Fail Again, Try Again

Well, I've never been good at sticking to structured plans, whether for reading, eating, exercising or any of the other ways I try to "improve" myself. I knew this when I chose the sidebar quote. 

So let's try being descriptive rather than prescriptive, just for one post. Here is a list of the books currently piled beside my bed, in the order they are piled in, which is partly based on size and partly on reading order. The bottom half of pile 2 (from Steve Jones down) is from the local library and the bottom two books of pile 3 are from the university library:

Pile 1, from top to bottom

Lois McMaster Bujold, Diplomatic Immunity (about to re-read)

Mary Renault, The Last of the Wine (unread)

Jo Walton, Farthing (unread)

Mike Carey, The Devil You Know (unread)

Gene Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun Vol 1: Shadow and Claw (partially read, need to re-read from beginning)

Arthur C Clarke, Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! (for dipping in and out of)

Ian McEwan, Atonement (unread)

Kage Baker, In The Garden of Iden (unread)

Samuel R Delany, The Motion of Light on Water: East Village Sex and Science Fiction Writing 1960-1965 (unread)

Samuel R Delany, The Jewels of Aptor (unread)

Junot Diaz, Drown (unread)

Nicholson Baker, Vox (unread)

Pile 2, from top to bottom

Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory (currently reading)

Saki, The Complete Short Stories (currently reading)

Lajos Egri, The Art of Dramatic Writing (unread)

The Paris Review Interviews Vol 1 (dipping in and out of)

Steve Jones, The Language of the Genes (unread)

The Enthusiast Field Guide to Poetry (dipping in and out of)

Steph Swainston, The Year of Our War (read)

Georgette Heyer, These Old Shades (read)

Nigel Groom, The Perfume Companion: A Connoisseur's Guide (unread)

Marge Piercy, So You Want To Write? (read)

John Campbell, Margaret Thatcher Vol 2: The Iron Lady (unread)

Pile 3, from top to bottom

Steven Rose, The Chemistry of Life (dipping in and out of)

Clifton Fadiman, The Lifetime Reading Plan (read)

Carol Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy (unread)

So, I wonder how long it will take me to get through that lot?! At the moment I truly want to read all of those books. By the time I get around to some of them, my enthusiasm will have waned and there will be other things I'm more in the mood for reading. I'm wondering whether I should be more lenient with myself about putting certain books on ice and getting on with the books that are seizing my attention in the here and now. 

A case in point: I bought The Wasp Factory a couple of weeks ago on impulse at a train station. I've never read it, even though it was a popular book in my friendship group when we were around 15 years old. When I bought it I was eager to read it, and I think if I'd started reading it straight away I probably would have sped through it in a couple of days. But I put off reading it because a) there were library books I felt I needed to read and return, b) there was a book belonging to a friend I felt I needed to read and return, and c) I think I was subconsciously punishing myself for being so impatient/impulsive as to buy a shiny new, expensive copy rather than waiting for a much cheaper second-hand copy (three of which I found for a fraction of the price the following day). Finally I started to read The Wasp Factory. Now I'm about a third of the way through and haven't picked it up for about a week. My enthusiasm has dissipated. But out of some notion of trying to discipline myself, I'm not allowing myself to read any other fiction until I've finished it. I'm starting to think this may be wrong, as the energy built up around the books in the pile will also have dissipated by then, and the whole cycle will keep going on (and costing me money as I keep buying new books I can get excited about... in fact this explains the bulging shelves of unread books in my room!)

So, I think I need to be easier on myself about putting books aside. I think what I'm scared of is my tendency to skim through or surf over huge quantities of information/narrative at a very superficial level, and that the pile of books put aside will become a tottering tower and I'll never finish a book again. But I'm in charge here (it strikes me, re-reading what I've read above, that I'm talking about myself as if I were a separate person... if you catch my drift) and I don't have to let it go that far.

The plan: tonight I will have another crack at The Wasp Factory and if I don't make substantial headway then I will lay it aside, without stressing about it, and take up the book which is calling to me the most!

List: Jane Smiley's 101 Books

From Jane Smiley's 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel. I will periodically update this post and strike through books as I read them. This isn't part of a particular challenge, though I suppose I could adopt it as my list if I tackle the 101 Books in 1001 days challenge.

1. Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji

2. Author unknown, The Saga of the People of Laxardal

3. Snorri Sturluson, Egil's Saga

4. Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron

5. Marguerite de Navarre, The Heptameron

6. Anonymous, Lazarillo de Tormes

7. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, vols 1 & 2

8. Madame de Lafayette, The Princess of Cleves

9. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko

10. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, Roxana

11. Samuel Richardson, Pamela

12. Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

13. Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote

14. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

15. Voltaire, Candide

16. Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker

17. Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses

18. The Marquis de Sade, Justine

19. Sir Walter Scott, The Tale of Old Mortality, The Bride of Lammermoor

20. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

21. Jane Austen, Persuasion

22. James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

23. Stendahl, The Red and the Black

24. Nicolai Gogol, Taras Bulba

25. Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time

26. Honore de Balzac, Cousin Pons, Cousin Bette

27. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

28. Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

29. William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair

30. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

31. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or the Whale

32. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

33. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

34. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

35. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White, The Moonstone

36. Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

37. Emile Zola, Therese Raquin

38. Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset, The Eustace Diamonds

39. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

40. Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

41. George Eliot, Middlemarch

42. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

43. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, The Awkward Age

44. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

45. Bram Stoker, Dracula

46. Kate Chopin, The Awakening

47. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles

48. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

49. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

50. Max Beerbohm, The Illustrated Zuleika Dobson, or an Oxford Love Story

51. Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier

52. Sinclair Lewis, Main Street

53. Sigrid Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter, volume I, The Wreath

54. James Joyce, Ulysses

55. Italo Svevo, Zeno's Conscience

56. E M Forster, A Passage to India

57. F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

58. Franz Kafka, The Trial

59. Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers

60. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

61. D H Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

62. Virginia Woolf, Orlando

63. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

64. Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, volume 1

65. Mikhail Sholokhov, And Quiet Flows the Don

66. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

67. Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

68. P G Wodehouse, The Return of Jeeves, Bertie Wooster Sees It Through, Spring Fever, The Butler Did It

69. T H White, The Once and Future King

70. Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children

71. Junichiro Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters

72. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

73. Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows

74. Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold Climate, Don't Tell Alfred

75. Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird

76. Jetta Carleton, The Moonflower Vine

77. Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

78. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

79. John Gardner, Grendel

80. Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

81. Naguib Mahfouz, The Harafish

82. Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea

83. David Lodge, How Far Can You Go?

84. Muriel Spark, Loitering With Intent

85. Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

86. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

87. Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John

88. J M Coetzee, Foe

89. Toni Morrison, Beloved

90. A S Byatt, Possession

91. Nicholson Baker, Vox

92. Garrison Keillor, WLT: A Radio Romance

93. Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum

94. Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance

95. Francine Prose, Guided Tours of Hell

96. Chang-rae Lee, A Gesture Life

97. Arnost Lustig, Lovely Green Eyes

98. Zadie Smith, White Teeth

99. John Updike, The Complete Henry Bech

100. Ian McEwan, Atonement

101. Jennifer Egan, Look at Me

Reading the Author Challenge: Jane Austen

So, I had no idea (though I should have guessed) that there was this whole internet subculture of reading challenge blogs, but seeing as I am the queen of (mostly unfinished) reading lists and challenges, count me in!

This month, pretty much all of my reading for pleasure has been an attempt at Jane Austen's novels (and major fragments) in sequence, so I was really pleased to find this challenge to join. The "in sequence" bit has been a bit of a pain, actually, as Austen's books were not published in the sequence they were written, and some were published posthumously. Also, some of the novels were revised many years after they were written, but before publication, and scholars don't always agree as to the sequence of this work. What I really wanted was to get a sense of the development in Austen's style and thematic concerns, but because of the factors mentioned above, it's a more complicated question than I thought at first. I think if I were to do another Austen re-read (!) in the future, I would read the books in a slightly different sequence to the one I've read them in this month.

This month's order:

Lady Susan

Sense and Sensibility

Pride and Prejudice

Northanger Abbey

The Watsons

Mansfield Park

Emma

Persuasion

Sanditon 

Revised order:

Lady Susan

Northanger Abbey

Sense and Sensibility

Pride and Prejudice

The Watsons

Mansfield Park

Emma

Persuasion

Sanditon

The reason for the revised order is what I found to be the dramatic change in tone between the earlier books and the later books. After reading Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey, which are very upbeat, sparky books, I was really struck, when I read The Watsons and Mansfield Park, with how much more complex and downbeat they were. When I did some research and found out that there was pretty much a decade where Austen didn't write (apart from the unfinished fragment of The Watsons) or publish any fiction, probably due to her uncertain family circumstances, and then the first book after this hiatus was Mansfield Park, it all became clear. I think it was more of a shock to go from the youthful sarcasm and high spirits of Northanger Abbey to The Watsons and Mansfield Park than it would have been to go from the more sedate perfection of Pride and Prejudice to the later books, and so that's why, if I had my time over again, I'd read Northanger Abbey earlier in the list. I've placed it before Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice as, whether or not it was started before them, it probably didn't get revised before publication, whereas S&S and P&P both went through considerable rewriting before attaining their final form.

So, at the moment I'm nearly finished Emma, with Persuasion and Sanditon to go. More Jane Austen thoughts soon!