Vincennes Review Of Books 2014
2014 was a year in which I read fewer books than normal, but was really happy with what I did read. The big projects I completed this year were:
Firstly, though, here is the graph of books read this year, with a new colour palette for a new decade of the Vincennes Review Of Books:
You will note that this is a drop in the number of books read, despite the fact that there have been no changes in the time I took to get to work and despite my smug banging on about how every two minutes of my communte is a book read in the year. The explanation for this shift is extremely simple. For about six months of 2014, I would spend the train from London Bridge to home reading the posts on an online wedding community. This was highly soothing and enjoyable and cost me about 20 books over the course of the year.
Non-fiction suffered more than fiction as a result of this shift:
- but overall, the trend towards non-fiction continues, making up over a third of my reading last year. Again, non-fiction was strongly influenced by getting married. On which note! if you are planning a wedding, you are no doubt familiar with both Offbeat Bride and A Practical Wedding, and you might be wondering which if either of the books are worth reading. I can wholeheartedly recommend the A Practical Wedding book, and would actively not recommend the Offbeat Bride book, which was often meanspirited. Also - it is easy to forget that "offbeat" does not mean "easy", and at times means "intensely stressful".
One happy trend to which these books did contribute was an increase in the proportion of books by women that I read:
The extent to which the default male:female ratio (for me at least) is 80:20 continues to amaze me. I've just checked to see if I have any kind of excuse for this in 2012, the year after I'd made a concerted effor to read more female authors. I do not. Nevertheless, I will continue to make said efforts in 2015, skewing the "classics" project towards women (George Eliot, Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell are all in the plan)
Rereading The Bible
Last year, I read the Bible (on YouVersion, i.e. on my telephone) using Professor Horner's Bible Reading System. This year, I used a more generic plan (The Bible In A Year) and it really served to highlight how excellent the Prof. Horner reading plan is. I went into this in a bit of detail last year, and would like to take more time on it this year as well, in case you remain unconvinced.
Each day in the plan will take you through ten chapters from ten different areas of the Bible, and you progress through each of those areas in order. To make this easier to understand (I hope) I have created a visualisation of how this works. The counts on the X axis represent days of the plan. Each new level of transparency represents a different book - so you can see from the top row that every day you will read a chapter of one of the four Gospels, and from the bottom row that every day you'll read a chapter from the book of Acts:
Let's have a look at how this breaks down in practise, with a slice of five days chosen at near-random:
What I really valued about this was how it combined the pleasure of reading with the pleasure of rereading - so you be read some parts of the Bible for the second, third, or nth time, while you were reading other parts for the first time. Just beautiful - you get a real sense of it as a book that has grown, and grown around a tradition, as well as clearer sense of what those traditions meant and mean. I'll be following this plan again in 2015, and as ever, if you would like to join it would be great to have you along.
Rereading In Search Of Lost Time in the latest translation
I last read this massive work in 2006, which was also the first year I produced a the Vincennes Review of Books. This time around, I enjoyed it a lot more, due to a combination of factors summarised below.
20062014
Reading for the first timeReading for the second time
Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation; fancied up prosePrendergast edited translated; more faithful to the original
Read mostly on trains between Redhill and Tulse HillRead mostly in Mauritius
Communting to and from a job I hatedOn vaction from job I did not hate
Not on honeymoonOn honeymoon
The project of the new translation was to be somewhat close to reading Proust in the French. Apparently the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation does a lot of flowering-up of Proust's words - whilst his sentences are complicated, the language which he uses is not. This could have been another factor in my enjoyment of reading it, but the main factor is the pure joy of rereading something of this size. It's a similar satisfaction to that of visiting a large city a second time - neither being entirely sure nor entirely unsure where the next turn is going to take you, and feeling enormously pleased to find yourself where you think you should be.
I also greatly enjoyed reading each of the different translator's introductions, particularly that of James Grieve (In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower) who made it quite clear that he wouldn't consider his life worth living if he couldn't establish chronology better than this jumped up little shut-in.
Finish reading all of Iris Murdoch's novels
This is a project which I started, without really knowing it, when at 15 I read The Flight From The Enchanter. The first Iris Murdoch I attempted to read (still at 15) was The Time Of The Angels - which in the end, was the last novel of hers I will read for the first time. I don't know if I would have continued with this project if I had not swapped out The Time Of The Angels in 1997. It is particularly nasty.
In any case, this is what one of my bookshelves look like now I have and have read all 26:
These are also in order of publication. There is an unbroken run of wonderful, wonderful books between Bruno's Dream and The Sea, The Sea, so if you are thinking of embarking on Iris Murdoch (you don't have to read them all and I have anti-recommendations too) I'd recommend anything from that middle section. The Bell is also excellent, and much more in fitting with the mid-period novels than the earlier ones.
Misc notes on other books read in 2014
My two favourite new reads from this year are Ruth Ozeki's Tale For The Time Being and Siri Hustvedt's The Blazing World. I will never tire of reading Siri Hustvedt describe art, she is wonderful. Both of these books are beautiful and unhappy and kind and I unreservedly recommend them both.
I also read Primo Levi's The Periodic Table, the first of his books that I've read. I keep meaning to read If Not Now, When? but, much to my chagrin, never get around to it.
Aims for 2015
My main aim for 2015 is to return to my roots as a 14-18 year old try hard, i.e., read a lot of the classics. There are some specific and vague aims folded into this:
- Reread the Bible
- Reread In Search Of Lost Time in the latest full translation
- Finish reading all of Iris Murdoch's novels
- Misc notes on other books read in 2014
- Aims for 2015
Firstly, though, here is the graph of books read this year, with a new colour palette for a new decade of the Vincennes Review Of Books:
You will note that this is a drop in the number of books read, despite the fact that there have been no changes in the time I took to get to work and despite my smug banging on about how every two minutes of my communte is a book read in the year. The explanation for this shift is extremely simple. For about six months of 2014, I would spend the train from London Bridge to home reading the posts on an online wedding community. This was highly soothing and enjoyable and cost me about 20 books over the course of the year.
Non-fiction suffered more than fiction as a result of this shift:
- but overall, the trend towards non-fiction continues, making up over a third of my reading last year. Again, non-fiction was strongly influenced by getting married. On which note! if you are planning a wedding, you are no doubt familiar with both Offbeat Bride and A Practical Wedding, and you might be wondering which if either of the books are worth reading. I can wholeheartedly recommend the A Practical Wedding book, and would actively not recommend the Offbeat Bride book, which was often meanspirited. Also - it is easy to forget that "offbeat" does not mean "easy", and at times means "intensely stressful".
One happy trend to which these books did contribute was an increase in the proportion of books by women that I read:
The extent to which the default male:female ratio (for me at least) is 80:20 continues to amaze me. I've just checked to see if I have any kind of excuse for this in 2012, the year after I'd made a concerted effor to read more female authors. I do not. Nevertheless, I will continue to make said efforts in 2015, skewing the "classics" project towards women (George Eliot, Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell are all in the plan)
Rereading The Bible
Last year, I read the Bible (on YouVersion, i.e. on my telephone) using Professor Horner's Bible Reading System. This year, I used a more generic plan (The Bible In A Year) and it really served to highlight how excellent the Prof. Horner reading plan is. I went into this in a bit of detail last year, and would like to take more time on it this year as well, in case you remain unconvinced.
Each day in the plan will take you through ten chapters from ten different areas of the Bible, and you progress through each of those areas in order. To make this easier to understand (I hope) I have created a visualisation of how this works. The counts on the X axis represent days of the plan. Each new level of transparency represents a different book - so you can see from the top row that every day you will read a chapter of one of the four Gospels, and from the bottom row that every day you'll read a chapter from the book of Acts:
Let's have a look at how this breaks down in practise, with a slice of five days chosen at near-random:
What I really valued about this was how it combined the pleasure of reading with the pleasure of rereading - so you be read some parts of the Bible for the second, third, or nth time, while you were reading other parts for the first time. Just beautiful - you get a real sense of it as a book that has grown, and grown around a tradition, as well as clearer sense of what those traditions meant and mean. I'll be following this plan again in 2015, and as ever, if you would like to join it would be great to have you along.
Rereading In Search Of Lost Time in the latest translation
I last read this massive work in 2006, which was also the first year I produced a the Vincennes Review of Books. This time around, I enjoyed it a lot more, due to a combination of factors summarised below.
20062014
Reading for the first timeReading for the second time
Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation; fancied up prosePrendergast edited translated; more faithful to the original
Read mostly on trains between Redhill and Tulse HillRead mostly in Mauritius
Communting to and from a job I hatedOn vaction from job I did not hate
Not on honeymoonOn honeymoon
The project of the new translation was to be somewhat close to reading Proust in the French. Apparently the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation does a lot of flowering-up of Proust's words - whilst his sentences are complicated, the language which he uses is not. This could have been another factor in my enjoyment of reading it, but the main factor is the pure joy of rereading something of this size. It's a similar satisfaction to that of visiting a large city a second time - neither being entirely sure nor entirely unsure where the next turn is going to take you, and feeling enormously pleased to find yourself where you think you should be.
I also greatly enjoyed reading each of the different translator's introductions, particularly that of James Grieve (In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower) who made it quite clear that he wouldn't consider his life worth living if he couldn't establish chronology better than this jumped up little shut-in.
Finish reading all of Iris Murdoch's novels
This is a project which I started, without really knowing it, when at 15 I read The Flight From The Enchanter. The first Iris Murdoch I attempted to read (still at 15) was The Time Of The Angels - which in the end, was the last novel of hers I will read for the first time. I don't know if I would have continued with this project if I had not swapped out The Time Of The Angels in 1997. It is particularly nasty.
In any case, this is what one of my bookshelves look like now I have and have read all 26:
These are also in order of publication. There is an unbroken run of wonderful, wonderful books between Bruno's Dream and The Sea, The Sea, so if you are thinking of embarking on Iris Murdoch (you don't have to read them all and I have anti-recommendations too) I'd recommend anything from that middle section. The Bell is also excellent, and much more in fitting with the mid-period novels than the earlier ones.
Misc notes on other books read in 2014
My two favourite new reads from this year are Ruth Ozeki's Tale For The Time Being and Siri Hustvedt's The Blazing World. I will never tire of reading Siri Hustvedt describe art, she is wonderful. Both of these books are beautiful and unhappy and kind and I unreservedly recommend them both.
I also read Primo Levi's The Periodic Table, the first of his books that I've read. I keep meaning to read If Not Now, When? but, much to my chagrin, never get around to it.
Aims for 2015
My main aim for 2015 is to return to my roots as a 14-18 year old try hard, i.e., read a lot of the classics. There are some specific and vague aims folded into this:
- Read Gogol's Dead Souls, inexplicably missed when I was in my Russian novels try-hard phase
- Read Samuel Richardson's Clarissa. Feel free to discourage me from this, ask me what I intend to achieve by it, etc.
- Read more of the classics by women; specifically read Mill On The Floss and reread all of Jane Austen, more vaguely read more Elizabeth Gaskell and others (recommendations welcome)