Vincennes Review Of Books 2013
This is too late in the year to be doing my review of books, but it's been a fantastic year of reading and I want to get at least a precis down somewhere.
Firstly, totals and an important realisation about the relationship between my commute and work. I read 62 books this year, one more than last year, and this was driven by new books - I did two rereads this year (and neither were The Great Gatsby) and six in the one prior. The commute/work realisation is that the number of books I read in a year is very consistently equal to the number of minutes in my morning commute. It takes about an hour to get to Camden in the mornings, so I'll read about sixty books a year. When I worked in Shoreditch and walked up from Bank, my commute was about thirty minutes and I read about as many books.
My big (very big) project from this year was to read the Bible. If you are, for any reason at all, considering doing this, I cannot recommend it highly enough. I used the YouVersion app, and specifically this plan - which is a lot of reading (10 chapters a day) but the way it's structered keeps you seeing new connections in things you've read before. One thing that delighted me (which you don't get from the readings that you hear in church or see on posters) is the extent to which the single most important unit of the relationship in the Bible is friendship - I, like everyone else, am very used to media that prioritises romantic love, which barely gets a look in in this enormous and varied book. At the ends of the Epistles, where Paul and others write things that feel almost unnervingly modern; however formal the language of the King James Version sounds now, the clarity of the sentiment is still there. "Send my love." "I left my coat at our mutual friend's house, can you fetch it for me next time you're there." "I'm going to be in town for a couple of days, have a bed ready for me." "I miss you." Beautiful.
The other big reading project was New Yorktumn which, unsurprisingly, was spending the autumn reading books about New York. This project spanned most of the 20th century (from Manhattan Transfer to The Flamethrowers) and included two nonfiction books (this Andy Warhol bio and the Maxwell Perkins letters, of which more later) but through all of these books there was a sense of a city breathing people in and out again - the people changed (within books as well as between them), but the streets didn't.
Maxwell Perkins, though, wrote the best guide to managing difficult people I've read all year. I was a few months into managing someone in New York when I read this interesting collection of letters between Perkins and Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, whose work he was editing, and it was inspirational to see how he managed these undeniably difficult people from a distance. One thing that particularly struck me was how he gave feedback - always asking what the intended audience would think, always asking what they should notice first. I can confirm that this tactic works almost a century on, when you want someone to change a particularly oblique graph in a PowerPoint deck.
You may remember the Iris Murdoch runrate, in which I estimated that I would have read all of her books by 2016/7. I am delighted to announce that I am on track for finishing ahead of target on this, and thanks to an Iris Murdoch reading club with a longsuffering Saxey, I have only ONE of her (Murdoch's) books left to read! I also got a study of her work for Christmas. I hope a chapter is devoted to how and why all her books have the same plot.
My aim for this year is to read the new (now new-ish) translation of Proust - Cis alerted me to the world and works of Lydia Davis, and I'm really excited to see what she (Davis) does with Swann's Way/The Way By Swann's.
Previous years: 2012,2011, 2010, 2009, 2007, 2006
Firstly, totals and an important realisation about the relationship between my commute and work. I read 62 books this year, one more than last year, and this was driven by new books - I did two rereads this year (and neither were The Great Gatsby) and six in the one prior. The commute/work realisation is that the number of books I read in a year is very consistently equal to the number of minutes in my morning commute. It takes about an hour to get to Camden in the mornings, so I'll read about sixty books a year. When I worked in Shoreditch and walked up from Bank, my commute was about thirty minutes and I read about as many books.
My big (very big) project from this year was to read the Bible. If you are, for any reason at all, considering doing this, I cannot recommend it highly enough. I used the YouVersion app, and specifically this plan - which is a lot of reading (10 chapters a day) but the way it's structered keeps you seeing new connections in things you've read before. One thing that delighted me (which you don't get from the readings that you hear in church or see on posters) is the extent to which the single most important unit of the relationship in the Bible is friendship - I, like everyone else, am very used to media that prioritises romantic love, which barely gets a look in in this enormous and varied book. At the ends of the Epistles, where Paul and others write things that feel almost unnervingly modern; however formal the language of the King James Version sounds now, the clarity of the sentiment is still there. "Send my love." "I left my coat at our mutual friend's house, can you fetch it for me next time you're there." "I'm going to be in town for a couple of days, have a bed ready for me." "I miss you." Beautiful.
The other big reading project was New Yorktumn which, unsurprisingly, was spending the autumn reading books about New York. This project spanned most of the 20th century (from Manhattan Transfer to The Flamethrowers) and included two nonfiction books (this Andy Warhol bio and the Maxwell Perkins letters, of which more later) but through all of these books there was a sense of a city breathing people in and out again - the people changed (within books as well as between them), but the streets didn't.
Maxwell Perkins, though, wrote the best guide to managing difficult people I've read all year. I was a few months into managing someone in New York when I read this interesting collection of letters between Perkins and Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, whose work he was editing, and it was inspirational to see how he managed these undeniably difficult people from a distance. One thing that particularly struck me was how he gave feedback - always asking what the intended audience would think, always asking what they should notice first. I can confirm that this tactic works almost a century on, when you want someone to change a particularly oblique graph in a PowerPoint deck.
You may remember the Iris Murdoch runrate, in which I estimated that I would have read all of her books by 2016/7. I am delighted to announce that I am on track for finishing ahead of target on this, and thanks to an Iris Murdoch reading club with a longsuffering Saxey, I have only ONE of her (Murdoch's) books left to read! I also got a study of her work for Christmas. I hope a chapter is devoted to how and why all her books have the same plot.
My aim for this year is to read the new (now new-ish) translation of Proust - Cis alerted me to the world and works of Lydia Davis, and I'm really excited to see what she (Davis) does with Swann's Way/The Way By Swann's.
Previous years: 2012,2011, 2010, 2009, 2007, 2006