Every year someone starts wanging on about how much they dislike reading challenges and why should we engage in competitive reading and when did reading get all performative and so on. And every year this annoys me. Don’t like it? Don’t do it. If you do it and don’t read as many as you thought you might, who cares? It doesn’t matter. But there’s a whole column you can get out of dissing something private that others are doing, just because they track their stats on a public reading platform.
This annoys me every year and I’m pretty sure I bashed out a paragraph about this last year too. And now I’m over it.
Last year’s resolution to read fewer hyped books and take a more measured approach to quality books definitely paid off and I was much more satisfied with my review of the year. So more of the same this year I think. But I was thinking that I would try to find and read more twentieth century classics that I’ve missed out on. By that, I do not mean the usual suspects of twentieth century literature. I made the mistake of looking online at some of those recommended lists that newspapers do every once in a while: ‘The Best Twentieth Century Books EVER: Read them before you die’ type things. They all seem to be much of a muchness – dominated by white men – and including Ulysses, Gatsby, Lolita, the Catcher in the Rye etc. I mean, fine, but I think we can say safely that of these, if I’ve not already read them, I’m not going to now.
What I was interested in was not necessarily obscure books, but rather the books that people love that don’t make these lists. Last year I read A Month in the Country by JL Carr, Fair Stood the Wind for France by HE Bates, Mapp and Lucia by EF Benson (what is this thing for initials and surnames?), and How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn and really enjoyed them. White men all, as it happens but let’s consider some female writers too shall we? (As it happens, I did also read two by Rosamond Lehman last year too). These aren’t unknown books, they’re classics, but they’re in the next tier down from the same twentieth century classics that make these lists of ‘books you should read before you die.’
I think it’s interesting what these lists leave out. Sure, the books on the ‘approved’ lists are classics for a reason but we can’t all sit about reading Lolita and Ulysses all the time. (Or at all in my case.) There was no genre fiction, few women and hardly anyone who wasn’t white. No list I saw contained Du Maurier’s Rebecca or the aforementioned Month in the Country or Beloved or Their Eyes Were Watching God; only one suggested The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, only one mentioned a single Le Carre. One might have suggested a single Woolf. No Asimov or Philip K Dick or Flowers for Algernon or The Incredible Shrinking Man. None of them seem to include anything published after 1975. Bizarre. More than bizarre, simply joyless and dull.
So, in addition to three rogue nineteenth century books that I’ve decided to read this year (The Mill on the Floss, North and South and a reread of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall), slightly less famous twentieth century books will be my special project. So far the list looks like this:
- They Came Like Swallows – William Maxwell
- Miss Buncle’s Book – DE Stevenson
- The Chateau – William Maxwell
- Turtle Diary – Russell Hoban
- Chatterton Square – EH Young
- Abigail – Magda Szabo
- Lark Rise to Candleford – Flora Thompson
- All Passion Spent – Vita Sackville West
- The Priory – Dorothy Whipple
- The Grand Babylon Hotel – Arnold Bennett
- The Brontes Went to Woolworth’s – Rachel Ferguson
- True Grit – Charles Portis
Plus something by Jane Gardam and Mollie Panter-Downes but I need to investigate these more as I’m not sure of which titles would be best. And to bridge the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, maybe some HG Wells? Suggestions welcome.
The list has been compiled in a random and haphazard way and I’m very open to other ideas to add to it. Obviously I will also be reading a load of other things as they turn up throughout the year and tackling the tbr pile by the side of the sofa.
I’m rather looking forward to it.
Susan E Barsby 