My Year of Good Reads
Closing in on the end of the indiscriminately determined 12 month period that was 2018 leads many of us to review what we’ve accomplished, what we came close to reaching, and that gym membership that we only used a half a dozen times after our January detox. One goal I set myself for the past year was to read a certain number of books.
Knowing myself well-enough to realise that I needed some form of counting system to keep me on track, I joined https://www.goodreads.com/ . I set myself the modest total of 26 books to read, did what I assumed was the done thing of adding a load of books I’d already read, and chose a book to start with – Neil Gaiman’s ‘American Gods’. I’m the kind of person who likes to have a few books for different moods, locations and social occasions (yes, I occasionally read at social occasions, the same way a lot of other people conduct microscopic examinations of their social media at meal times) so James Church’s ‘Corpse in the Koryo’ went up there too. Then I was set. Eleven months of reading awaited as I started on February 10 – either as I’m not beholding to the Gregorian calendar or because I am really unorganised in Januaries. You decide.
As the months galloped by, I utilised my Kindle, books I’d bought to read but still hadn’t, the Wellington City library and Unity Bookstore for suitable tomes. Being an aspiring crime writer, I obviously had my fair share of modern works and classics in that genre to read including Lee Child, Pierre Lemaitre, Ragnar Jonasson, Eric Ambler, Georges Simenon and Ross MacDonald. I boned up on my Hammett, discovered how James Ellroy is even better in print than at the movies, added to my knowledge of the wonderful James Sallis and dodged hard time with Edward Bunker. I tried to branch out beyond genre fiction as well by reading James Baldwin, Anais Nin, Norman Mailer, Christopher Isherwood, Margaret Atwood. I re-read and re-appreciated Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’. I decided to find out more about Ishmael by starting the one about the whale. And I quickly went beyond my target of 26. Upwards to thirty, to forty, to fifty. I posted the GoodReads review I wrote for Neverworld Wake by Marisha Pessl (my number 51). Finally, today, I hit 53 and 204% of my target for the year.
So how do I feel? Kind of dis-satisfied, truth be told. Maybe it’s me. Maybe my niche as a genre fiction devotee has put me against anything over 300 pages. Maybe it’s the world we now live in full of work and dinners with friends, cinemas and Netflix. Starting with ‘American Gods’ felt like a statement of intent. Go after the big boys, the longer works. Maybe I thought one of the 26 might be David Foster Wallace’s ‘Infinite Jest’ or Thomas Mann’s ‘The Magic Mountain’. But what actually happened was, subconsciously at first, but then extremely consciously, I started looking at the book total instead of focusing on the pages. Are five books of 200 pages each as valuable as one work clocking in at one thousand? They are if you are counting spines. Roberto Bolano’s ‘Monsieur Pain’ is certainly an interesting read, but it is 122 pages. And although I had bought and settled it on my bookshelf long before I set up my GoodReads account, it felt like cheating.
And I never did find out what happened to Ishmael as my progress counter for ‘Moby Dick’ stands at 35%. Although I have at least met the monster.
So the New Year arrives in a few hours and I have to decide on a new total. ‘The Magic Mountain’ and ‘Infinite Jest’ are both still a few yards away from where I’m typing. Settled within arms reach, however, is Graham Greene’s sharply insightful but slight on word count ‘The Quiet American’. I truly believe that from a quality perspective, I’ve read broadly, intently and well in 2018. But when GoodReads asks me for my target tomorrow, I’m going to take a little time before deciding on that number, with memories of last year’s total chasing running through my head. Maybe my bedside locker should have something with a bit more heft on it. Maybe I’ll take care of that right now.
