Reading in 2013

I have a terrible memory, but I think 2013 has been a good year for reading overall. It was really the year I got 'back in' to reading. My interests at the beginning of the year were more science and anthropology, so I was reading books about those subjects. But they just didn't grip me as much as fiction books do, and I ended up not finishing many of them. Now I see that phase as a positive thing: I'm sure that I'm better off studying literature than social sciences.

I'm not sure when I really started reading, and I'm also not sure what made me suddenly more interested than I was before. This in itself is a good reason to document the year, and my current reading. I've tried to group books I've read this year into main categories, but of course there are ones which don't quite fit.

1. Classics
My renewed passion for reading led me to some of the books I was ashamed I had never read, but I'm glad I can say I have tried them now. For example, I had never read To Kill a Mockingbird before this year, although I have no idea why. It was not particularly challenging and I feel like it might have had a greater impact on me had I been younger. At least having read it I no longer feel like I have missed out on something fundamental. I'm glad I made it through other books as well, like Catch-22, which seems like one of those books people are always intending to read, and The Brothers Karamazov.
Other classics I've read this year:

• Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
• Howards End, E. M. Forster
• The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot
• Adam Bede, George Eliot
• Fankenstein, Mary Shelley
• The Picture of Dorian Grey, Oscar Wilde

There are many, many more classics to read. There are probably more than I could read in a lifetime, let alone in 2014. Just thinking about the books I haven't read but have to read makes me nervous. In 2014 (off the top of my head) I want to read:

• Middlemarch, George Eliot
• Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
• The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer

2. Virginia Woolf
For some reason I picked up To the Lighthouse in the library and I was hooked on Woolf's writing style. To the Lighthouse remains one of the few books that really blew me away, and I think I will be able to read it again and again and find new things in it. Following this I read her major works and was inspired to look at some other modernist fiction by female authors. Mrs Dalloway lead me to the novel and film of The Hours, which I loved on fist viewing but now I'm unsure about. I read:

• To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
• A Room of Ones Own, Virginia Woolf
• Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
• The Hours, Michael Cunningham
• The Waves, Virginia Woolf
• Orlando, Virginia Woolf
• Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
• The Garden Party, Katherine Mansfield
• The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman

There's still more Woolf to read- her lesser known fiction and her diaries, for example. Of course I want to read more around modernism, but I'm probably not going to be attempting Ulysses. A Portrait of the Artist, maybe. Short fiction has been interesting me more towards the end of this year, so I'm interested to see what Woolf does with the form.

3. Women writers
I think I probably stumbled on to Virginia Woolf through my growing interest in women writers. Earlier this year I became absorbed in Edith Wharton novels, after visiting New York. I'm not sure if I took The Age of Innocence and Ethan Frome entirely seriously, but there was a certain harshness about them I liked. I felt guilty about reading too many books by women, but I later decided this wasn't such a bad thing. I decided to read what I felt like reading rather than focusing on her sex of the author, and I think that's the best way to go about it.

 

 Many of the contemporary authors I'm interested in are women, for example Margaret Atwood, who I've read a lot of. I also discovered Donna Tartt's The Secret History and The Little Friend. Other contemporary books by women I read this year include Oranges are not the only fruit, On beauty and Too much happiness.

Next year I'm looking forward to reading:

• The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton
• The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt
• The Robber Bride, Margaret Atwood
• The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton

The main thing missing from this list is authors who are not from England or America- something I am looking forward to rectifying next year. I already feel like I've set myself a lot of books to read next year, and while a year is a long time in terms of reading, I may be being a little optimistic about what I can achieve. I guess I'll have to wait and see!