Reading resolutions

Edward Gibbon

By ADRIAN TAHOURDIN

I’m not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions, mainly because I find it so hard to keep them. Swim twice a week? Not enough time, or the water in the indoor pool’s too chlorinated. Drink less alcohol? How about drinking more?

But it occurred to me that a couple of reading resolutions might be in order. I haven’t made these before and I generally try to balance the old and the new or unexpected as much as I can in my reading. Next year, however, in an attempt to plug some of the enormous gaps in my literary-historical knowledge, I’ve resolved to read Herodotus’ Histories, in the translation by Tom Holland that Edith Hall gave a favourable review to in the TLS (November 15, 2013). Hall makes it sound like quite good fun, apart from anything else. She commends the edition for its “well-pitched notes, and a brilliant introduction by Paul Cartledge, the best living exponent of scholarly controversies in ancient Greek history”, and professes herself to be “in awe of Tom Holland’s achievement”. I’ve ordered myself a copy.

And to go with Herodotus? How about Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? Well, I can make a start on it at least. Actually, I think I’ll take a rather easier option and kick off – a little perversely perhaps – with Gibbon’s Autobiography, of which I have a very neat pocket hardback edition before me. It’s only 300-odd pages long, and opens:

“In the fifty-second year of my age, after the completion of an arduous and successful work, I now propose to employ some moments of my leisure in reviewing the simple transactions of a private and literary life. Truth, naked, unblushing truth, the first virtue of more serious history, must be the sole recommendation of this personal narrative.”

I’m hooked already. Happy 2015.