Your 2023 Reading List

[JoonT]

Have you got a reading list for the coming year? These are the books I hope to get through (I almost certainly won't btw):

Jane Austen: Emma
P G Wodehouse: The Blandings novels
Yuval Harari: Homo Deus
Dickens: The Pickwick Papers
Aldous Huxley: Point Counter Point
Thomas Halliday: Otherlands
Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway
Joseph Conrad: The Secret Agent
Bertrand Russell: The Conquest of Happiness
Merlin Sheldrake: Entangled Life
Peter Ackroyd: Blake
Harold Bloom: The Western Canon
Robert Graves: Goodbye to All That
Kurt Vonnegut: Sirens of Titan
Edward St Aubyn: Mother's Milk
Patrick Leigh Fermor: Mani
Tom Stoppard: Arcadia

I have been following Harold Bloom's list, and ticking them off as I go. It's not flawless (he loves Philip Roth, for example, who I detest, and he doesn't include anything by Wodehouse or Ted Hughes or Tolkien). Still, it seems a pretty good guide to the great books.

I'm going to listen to more audiobooks this year. Laying in a hot bath listening to Stephen Fry read P G Wodehouse or Evelyn Waugh or Sherlock Holmes is pure bliss. Otherlands has had some glowing reviews. I also like the look of Sheldrake's book on fungi. Sounds boring I know, but I've dipped into it and it's fascinating. I think I might listen to Fry read the Harry Potter books as well.

Unfortunately, I'm a slow reader, so I doubt I'll get through them all. I want to read Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, for example, but it's so flippin long, as is Herman Hesse's Glass bead Game. My resolution is to read more non-fiction (I've never read Sagan's Cosmos, or anything by Richard Dawkins), and also more plays – especially Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter.

If anyone has read any of the books on the list, I'd be interested to hear what you thought.

Good idea. Copying the first dozen novels from my Kindle that I actually intend to read. (Please forgive upper case - it’s too much to retype.) Will ignore the scattered piles of unread volumes around the house.

The Rinehart Frames CHESWAYO MPHANZA
Prince of Monkeys: A Novel NNAMDI EHIRIM
A Helping Hand CELIA DALE
The House of Rust: A Novel KHADIJA ABDALLA BAJABER
The Eternal Audience of One RÉMY NGAMIJE
David Mogo Godhunter SUYI DAVIES OKUNGBOWA
The Upper World FEMI FADUGBA
I Who Have Never Known Men JACQUELINE HARPMAN
Burma Boy BIYI BANDELE
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida SHEHAN KARUNATILAKA
Freshwater AKWAEKE EMEZI
Like A Mule Bringing Ice Cream To The Sun SARAH LADIPO MANYIKA

I will say a loud nothing about Harold Bloom - though I have read almost the complete works of half the writers on your list. And I have an abiding memory from my undergrad days of lending my copy of The Glass Bead Game to my father when I went home on vacation. He read it and cried.

(Though I wonder if this thread might be better placed here:

www.mumsnet.com/talk/what_were_reading

So it can be easily found?)

Sorry - the first in my list is poetry, not fiction! May replace with:

Sterling Karat Gold ISABEL WAIDNER