Big reading projects for 2024

[JaneyGee]

Do you have any reading projects planned for the coming year? How about the big monsters? I try and get through one every year. Last year, I read (and loved) George Eliot's Middlemarch. The year before it was Dickens' Bleak House, and the year before that it was The Canterbury Tales (though I confess I skipped a bit).

These little projects haven't always been a success btw. I gave up on The Divine Comedy (didn't even reach the end of the Inferno) and also on Proust. I slogged my way to the end of Milton's Paradise Lost, and though I liked parts of it, found it hard going overall.

I've got a weird, almost supernatural faith in the canon. It's like a substitute for religion. Harold Bloom is my go-to guide, and I generally follow his advice. My 2024 reading list is:

Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway
Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre
Jane Austen: Emma
Daniel Defoe: Moll Flanders
Joseph Conrad: Lord Jim
Ian McEwan: Atonement
Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse 5
Scott Fitzgerald: Tender is the Night
Ford Madox Ford: Parade's End
Ted Hughes: Collected Poems
Oscar Wilde: Collected Essays

I doubt I'll read even half of them, but that's the plan. I'm also determined to give Proust another crack.

I would suggest Steinbeck’s Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday. I usually don’t get on very well with classics, but I loved these two.
May ‘challenges’ are usually book club books, as they are often those I would not ordinarily choose.

I try to do at least one a year.

Over the last 3 years I've read:

David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
Anna of the Five Towns - Arnold Bennett
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
Of Mice & Men - John Steinbeck
The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

Not sure what I want to try this year though. Your thread has made me think about what is likely to happen to tackle.

War and Peace again for me, I like to do the chapter a day plan online, I can’t remember the bloggers name now. I have just finished Trollope’s Palliser novels so would like to try a couple of his stand alone ones and I really would like to read Dickens ‘ Our Mutual Friend.

Good idea for a thread. Watching for inspiration. Sometimes I listen to a big classic rather than read it. I'm halfway through East of Eden but finding it relentlessly depressing so may not finish it.

I read (paper version) of the Forsyth Saga a couple of years ago which was great.

Middlemarch is a good shout!

I've put my 'not read yet' books into a separate bookcase this year to encourage me to go and pick from it.

I'd really like to read Life and Fate this year. I started it years ago but only got 40 pages in.

King James Bible, although that'll be more over the course of a decade than a year

I love this! I'm a massive reader (more than 200 books in 2023) but I read too many schlocky thrillers.

Jane Eyre has been one of my favourite books since I was a child, you have such a treat waiting. And it's not a heavy going classic you have to plough through, it's a lovely very readable book.

I think I will join you in reading Emma. I've read and loved most of Jane Austen's books, I don't know why I haven't ever read Emma. It's not a deliberate choice, just happens to be one of the few Austens I don't have a copy of.

I'm going to make a third attempt at reading Moby Dick. The opening is so great, then it derails into loads of tedious and not scientifically correct lectures about the taxonomy and anatomy of whales.

I'm going to look at my bookshelves later and write up a list.

If you liked David Copperfield, you could try Bleak House. The critics (including Harold Bloom) seem to think that is his masterpiece. It’s also one of his longest.

Ah, yes War and Peace is exactly the sort of thing I had in mind. The big Russian monsters are perfect. I’ve always wanted to read The Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina and Crime and Punishment as well.

Yes, the Fosythe Saga is a good one.

A few others I’d recommend as reading challenges for 2024 (many of which I’ve never read btw):

Anthony Powell: A Dance to the Music of Time
Edward St Aubyn: Melrose novels
Thackeray: Vanity Fair
Ford Maddox Ford: Parade’s End
Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain
Boswell: Life of Johnson
Homer: Iliad and Odyssey

I’d really like a whole year free to tackle Proust. He’s a writer you need to slowly sink into.

God, there are so many classics I’ve never read. Wuthering Heights (shameful I know), Robinson Crusoe, Gullivers Travels, War of the Worlds, etc.

I loved Pride and Prejudice, so it will be interesting to compare it to Emma. Isn’t it one of the debates ‘Janeites’ get into in the pub? I mean which is better.

Great idea for a thread. I love your list.
I’m currently reading Ulysses, but slowly, with friends. We might finish it this year!
I might read some of the Russians. I’ve only read Anna Karenina and a couple of minor Russian 19th century novels so it’s definitely something I haven’t really done.
Also, Thomas Hardy. There’s a lot of his novels I haven’t read and a friend of mine is always banging on about him. I also want to read Madame Bovary. So let’s see, maybe this year:
Ulysses - James Joyce
Madame Bovary - Flaubert
War and Peace - Tolstoy
Crime and Punishment - Dostoevsky
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
The Mayor of Casterbridge - Hardy
That’s enough! I need to keep up with my book group novels and my modern stuff I like too.

Bleak House is one of Dickens' best IMO...I studied it for A level and have loved it ever since - there are so many layers and wordplays.

I studied Russian at uni so have read War and Peace, Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, Fathers and Sons etc.....I loved most of the literature we studied but found some of the plays just too melancholy....

I've just downloaded the Simon Sebag Montefiore The World onto my kindle. I'm aiming to finish that this year. And Putin's People which I started some time ago but haven't got to the end of yet....

Like a PP, I am an avid reader and alongside 'better' books, I have read around 100 crappy thrillers this year, mainly on kindle in the small hours due to chronic insomnia, so am hoping to read a more highbrow collection this year. I shall take inspiration from this thread!

One book I’m determined to read this year is Harold Bloom’s Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles. He wrote it when he was 90, and it’s his farewell to the poets he’s loved. It also has the greatest subtitle ever: ‘the power of the reader’s mind over a universe of death’. Bloom believed in the power of great literature to heal and guide you, even through death itself. I’ve completely lost faith in the literary establishment. They’ve caved in to the woke mob. Authors now get published, or win awards, not for the quality of their work but because they tick certain boxes. Bloom fought against that. He focuses on the authors he really considers great. The authors who have truly enriched his life. So you get chapters on Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Blake, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Byron, Tennyson, Browning, etc. The book itself is over 600 pages, so I want to read it carefully and slowly.

Of course! Ulysses! How could I have forgetter that? What do you think of it?

Hardy is a poor stylist (in places), but a wonderful storyteller. Funny you should mention him. Last month, I was earwigging a conversation in Neros coffee shop between two elderly gentleman. One of them was planning to retire, and told the other that he had set himself the goal of reading Hardy’s complete works.

God, how I envy you! I so wish I’d studied a language at university - especially Russian (or German). I’m working on my French atm. In fact, I think I’ll try Proust again this year. I’ll buy a notebook and try and read him partly in French, partly in English, making notes as I go.

I love Ulysses. Absolutely love it. Some of my friends hate it but we’re ploughing on regardless!
I’ve always wanted to read it but would never persevere if I tried to do it on my own.

I will confess to not having read any Proust @JaneyGee - in fact I did a joint honours degree, Russian with French, so perhaps I should make that a goal for this year!

I also think a goal of completing an author’s full works is a great idea for a challenge in itself.
I’ve read all of Jane Austen but that wasn’t a challenge because I re-read those as comfort reading anyway. She’s my favourite.
I was trying to read all of Dickens and have read most of them. I was doing well but came a cropper with The Pickwick Papers. Couldn’t finish the first few chapters.
My mum is reading all of The Brontes which is a great idea too. Sadly, none of them lived that long so there aren’t too many novels to read. I bought her some Penguin Classics of The Professor, Shirley and Vilette and her shelves look very pretty now.

I'm going to be controversial and throw my hat towards Northanger Abbey! I love P&P too, but Northanger Abbey is my clear favourite.

Looking at the unread books on my bookshelves, this year I'm going to try to read:
Don Quixote.
White Teeth.
Dune.
Complete works of Thomas Pynchon (have read a few, but not all).
Middlemarch.

Love the idea of putting TBR books on a separate bookshelf. Definitely going to do this! I have so many and need to stop buying books!

Would recommend Vanity Fair if you want to read a classic. Great fun and rattles along. Not a chore at all.

This year I seem to have exclusively read women writing between the wars, with the odd 1950s outlier. It’s all the modern books that people rave about that I feel I should be reading, rather than the classics. Haven’t read any of the prize winners from the last few years. They just all seem a bit worthy.

Im realising I don't know what literary style is. I would think of Hardy as an amazing stylist, in that his prose can be so atmospheric and emotive, so much so that you can forgive his awful characters. Does style mean something else, or am I misremembering what makes him great? I've only ever managed to finish Tess - everything else I've tried of his I stop dead after a few chapters.

I bought Life and Fate on my kindle so am going to read that this year and going to try to read Vanity Fair and the Pallister novels

https://brianedenton.medium.com/a-year-of-war-and-peace-cc66540d9619#.rj5ns91eu

This is the blog I have used to read along with War and Peace.

In terms of big, chunky books - I think this might be my Wolf Hall year.

In terms of classics - Crime and Punishment. Love the idea of one classic per year.