A New Year of Reading

The perfect escape

Piles of French Novels, Vincent Van Gogh, 1887

Maybe we’re supposed to feel sad and slow in the chill baby days of a new year. Maybe we’re tired, wrung out from last year. Maybe this landscape, this drear palette, is just where we need to sit for a bit to recover, so that we can march into spring refreshed (which is absolutely nowhere near, but pretty much all I think about.)

Cue the books.

My favorite thing about the New Year/clean slate thing is all the reading potential. A whole new year! A brand new list! Never mind all the books I wanted to read last year (or the years before) that still gather dust on the bedside shelf.

Books are my addiction and I’m not sorry. There are stacks in every room, on most surfaces. The volumes that come in vastly outpace those that go out. I buy lots of used books, support the local indie, and dip into the twice-a-year library book sale where I grab a five dollar grocery bag full. It is my greatest happiness.

I can’t keep up with the weekly New Yorker, but just grabbed about twenty issues of The New York Review of Books on the free shelf at the library. And I also still check books out of the library, because THE LIBRARY.

And all the newsletters MY GOD. I swore to tame them this year and have instead signed up for a dozen more since the holidays. So many good newsletters, my favorites tell me what to read.

Maybe my magpie curiosity is fine. At least most of the clutter is digital. Okay, that’s a lie (see stacks of books, NYers, and NYRBs), but the digital can be wiped out in a minute. When I die, no one will drown in my digital clutter. Unless they take a dip there, in which case - good luck. The sea of tabs, email, and bookmarks.

All this reading potential represents hope. It assumes I will stay alive and remain curious. It provides touchstones to share and a way to keep busy. It allows me to have “goals” without doing much. And it’s good for us!

As Ron Charles points out in the Washington Post Book Club newsletter:

“As you think about healthier living in the new year, I hope you’ll also keep in mind your literary habits. It turns out that reading books is not just enlightening, it’s literally enlivening. A 2016 study from the Yale University School of Public Health found that people who read books enjoyed a 20 percent reduction in risk of mortality compared to those who don’t.

More from WaPo Book Club:

“New Year’s reading resolutions — like all New Year’s resolutions — are typically recipes for guilt and disappointment, but here are eight modest suggestions for 2023:

• Join a book club. The gentle social pressure of a regular deadline could encourage you to read more and have more fun doing it. 

• Read the unread books you already own. I could spend a decade doing this.

• Sign up for a book-a-month from an indie bookstore (like this one). Turning your selection process over to a stranger might feel risky, but it will introduce you to new authors.

• Read the books you pretended to read in school. “The Mill on the Floss,” here I come! 

• Dedicate this year to reading only works in translation. You’ll permanently expand your horizons. (The National Book Foundation has great suggestions.)

• Keep a record of what you read. You could start a reading journal like this one from Moleskine or use an online site like Goodreads. Your list, lightly annotated, can become a charming history of your mental life.

• Read titles from a genre you’ve always ignored. Who knows, you might actually like history, romance or graphic novels if you’d just give them a chance. Worst case scenario: You develop a better-informed aversion.  

• Tackle a long classic. Whether it’s something old (“Moby-Dick”) or something new (“The Books of Jacob”), you’ll enjoy it more than you think, and the accomplishment will embolden you to conquer other intimidating books.”

Re: the above list - I’m in a book club, I definitely need to read the books I own, and will never sign up for a book-of-the-month club because I’m already buried. After reading My Life with Bob, by Pamela Paul, I started keeping a reading record with my own Bob. She’s since been canceled, but I love Bob. Book club forces the reading of genres I may otherwise ignore (I’ll read fantasy IF I HAVE TO) and sometimes there are pleasant surprises. Middlemarch is the long classic I plan to read this year.

Also hoping to:

• Trim the newsletter subscriptions, and keep up with the good ones.

• Read the damned magazines or unsubscribe (threat to self).

• Read and rotate the books on the dusty bedside shelf (and dust the shelf).

These are tip-of-the-iceberg plans. There are so many books I want to read, and book club just added nine to the list. (Including this and this - we picked well.)

In 2023, I’m hoping to finally get to Elizabeth McCracken and Ruth Ozeki. I want to read Doris Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark because Dana Spiotta recommended it as a great book about a woman in midlife (read Spiotta’s Wayward, thank me later). I’d like to read this because everyone in the whole world loved it and FOMO. The book about death and the one about trees. Something light, and something heavy. And always, books about food.

And so, I sail into the new year with hope and best intentions, a load of lists and a lot of unknowns. By the end, I will have read books that I’ve not even heard of yet and that’s part of the fun. I need to make room (time) for all the volumes that have been so patiently waiting, though. Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy and more Tana French. Another Ferrante and a juicy rock and roll bio. Essays and memoir, old fiction and new. So many, too many, never enough.

Happy reading!
Lisa

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Book things to share:

• Do you own too many books? Absolutely not.

• What to do with all the books? “There are millions of books in the world. Twelve thousand is nothing. It’s like having a pound of salt from the ocean.” Fran Lebowitz is keeping all of them.

• I was a late subscriber to Bookforum, and now it’s gone.😞 Where will I read about the books I’m not reading?

• Elizabeth Marro
  (whose newsletter Spark has quickly become a fave) has put together a collection of #Bookstackers, publishers of bookish newsletters. A clue to my beloved digital clutter.

• Here’s a list of books I read in 2022.

• The Booksellers looks fabulous.

• (Sorry not sorry for all the links - book links are the best links.)

• I love pics of book stacks - drop yours in the comments! Here’s one of mine. No, I haven’t read Crime and Punishment yet. Should I?

  

  too little time