A year in books

For over ten years I’ve been keeping track of the books I read, noting the total at the end of each year. My highest was 53 - the year I was in a book-reading contest with a friend. This last year was my absolute lowest: 6.

In my defence, I read many, many books last year. But because I only record a book if I read it cover-to-cover, few of them actually ‘count’. Many were for my thesis and I would read select chapters or skim through the pages. I also read endless journal articles, policy papers, reports, etc. So 6 doesn't really give the right impression.

Last night, for the first time in months, I finished a novel. It wasn't a particularly fantastic book -The Help by Kathryn Stockett about Black domestic servants in Mississippi during the 60s. But it was so nice to read a novel and let the words drift by casually without stopping to take notes. Like talking to a friend vs. listening to a lecture.

During the year of the reading competition our challenge was not only to read as many books as possible, but to read books from 40 different categories. I filled several by reading books by and about Jean-Paul Satre and Simone de Beauvoir – their correspondence, novels and plays as well as biographies and other books set during their lifetime. Each book offered insight to the others and this integrated method has since become one of my favourite ways to read.

Among the unfinished books of 2010 were several about Virginia Woolf – her diary, her letters, a biography and an early novel. But I never had time to finish most of these books before they were due back at the university library – and now that I am no longer a student I can’t take them out again. Oh well. While it was interesting reading about the development of such a keen and unique writer, I didn’t feel a real affinity with Virginia and so have decided to move on to another cluster topic: Iris Murdoch, a writer whose novels are deep and intricate and whom I look forward to learning much more about in the coming year.