For the past few years I've been in the habit of writing a little round up of my reading year in December, looking back through my reading journal (yes, I write down every book I read with a few sentences about what it did for me, I take reading very seriously!) and seeing what I thought I really wanted to share with others. This year I’ve decided not to do that. I’m trying to figure out why it feels wrong.
It’s not that I don’t like lists. I am actually a big fan. They’re a way of holding back the tides (tsunamis) of chaos that flood through life. I find that writing down my thoughts or things-to-be-done helps tease out the tangles in my mind and keeps me a little clearer of head. I keep a notebook where I write down everything from what I’ve got to do tomorrow to shopping lists to lists of things to think about in a work-in-progress. Sometimes I wonder if I should categorise my lists, or maybe have different notebooks for different kinds of tasks but then I decide that I’ve only got one brain and, for better or worse, everything I do has to live inside it.
Perhaps it’s because there's something too final about a list, something a little hierarchical. You try to get everything in there but there's inevitably something you forget. Perhaps it's because a list implies that that is all there is, that nothing lives outside the list, and very simple solutions to the complex things we experience are starting to feel like a con. Perhaps it's because the world is saturated with this kind of list. The Best __ of the Year, the Ten Books You Need to Understand the World Right Now, Seven Foods to Eat this Christmas to Start January Right. It’s stressful, and no one needs that.
If I were to make a list, I would include the books I’ve been drawn to that have really given me a lot to think about because of something they’re doing structurally; either with a large cast of characters or eschewing a traditional single point of view for a kind of polyphonous narrative that uses circularity rather than linearity as its guiding shape.
If I were to really commit to a list, I would write about how I realised in January that though I thought I had read all of Sir Terry Pratchett’s oeuvre at least twice, I had somehow missed out the Tiffani Aching books, got them out of the library, felt stupid as I found them to be up there with the best of his work and spent many weeks ruminating on the moral universe of Discworld. I could describe the way I’ve abandoned my plan of what I would read next to chase something I’ve only just heard of and then followed a reference in that to something else, like I’m on a personal treasure hunt for something I will never find. I could write about how I discovered RJ Barker and read The Tide Child trilogy with a full and aching heart. I could write about Barbara Kingsolver and Sofia Samatar and Tommy Orange.
But I am not making a list. Life and literature remain messy; they continue to resist the singularity I am able to achieve when I manage to buy every single thing I needed at the supermarket, or when I tick off the last present to buy for Christmas. Instead, I am writing a sort of plan for next year (yes, it is going in the lists book) and it says things like: research greenhouses, sort out hedge, new socks, Pier Paolo Pasolini?
What I’m reading
In a beautiful example of treasure hunting reading, just last week, I finished a book that mentioned Allen Ginsberg’s visit to Ezra Pound in exile in Venice in 1967 and decided I absolutely have to know more about Ginsberg right now, so I reserved two books about him from the library. Yes, I have always approved on Ginsberg and very much admired his life and work (while being a little impatient with the airs and graces of the rest of the Beats) but I didn't plan on finishing this year immersed in the sixties (although, the unconscious does work in strange, frequently beatific ways, as I have been reading quite a bit about other revolutionary poets of the sixties a lot this year.)
What I’m working on
I’ve been banging my head against edits for a very exciting thing which I’m hoping to be able to announce some time soon. Am I making it better? That is the aim, and I have (of course) a list of things I’m trying to do in the manuscript to achieve that, but at this point I genuinely don’t know.