I Declare After All

...there is no enjoyment like reading...
Jane Austen

For a while among my blogging circle I seemed unique in that I had no desire or, seemingly, capacity to compose a list of books I would really like to have read by the time A.D. 2012 has lost itself among the backward annals of time. It seems that, unlike most of you, I don't possess the iron will required to really plough through a book I don't particularly like. I just flung down one this afternoon in a height of dudgeon, completely apathetic toward finishing it. Unlike most of you, I don't ever seem to get the chance to say, "I read The Thing of Such-and-Such by Mr. Whatever. I didn't really like it, but I finished it, and that's that." Additionally, I never really plan what I am going to read. When I feel it is 'time,' or when a book catches my fancy, I read it.

So the list I am about to compile is subject to change, and you should probably only call is a 'list' advisedly. "You can carve it in stone," said Barnaby. "I'll still deny it." But here, at least, is what I would like to read this year, not because this year or these books put together make anything particularly special, but because my temporal frame travels through time rather linearly and because this upcoming year seems, therefore, unavoidable, and because (most importantly) I want to read these books.

The Art of Medieval Hunting: the Hound and the Hawk - John Cummins (in progress)
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens (in progress)
The Kirkbride Conversations - Harry Blamires
The Everlasting Man - G.K. Chesterton
Beowulf - Mr. Whatever (again!)
The Golden Warrior - Hope Muntz
Mere Christianity - C.S. Lewis
The Discarded Image: an Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature - C.S. Lewis
Moonblood - Anne Elisabeth Stengl (when it comes out in April)
When Christ and His Saints Slept - Sharon Kay Penman
The Four Loves - C.S. Lewis
The Darkness and the Dawn - Thomas B. Costain
The Conquering Family - Thomas B. Costain
The Improvement of the Mind - Isaac Watts
Sword Song - Rosemary Sutcliff

If I put in much more I will be overreaching myself. When Christ and His Saints Slept looks daunting enough; coupled with The Improvement of the Mind (whose font is minuscule) I feel positively drowned in verbiage. If you calculate in a peppering of rereads (some bizarre and irrational part of me wants to reread The Lord of the Rings), it may be a busy year.

Speaking of bizarre, I have not yet got used to seeing my name - my name - turn up in a "my favourite authors" list, sandwiched between C.S. Lewis and Charlotte Bronte. I tell you, it's a mad, mad world.