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.

@Hibernatalie Footnotes and Tangents (on Instagram and Substack) is doing a Wolf Hall readlong this year - called Wolf Crawl.

My concern with relying too much on a critic like Harald Bloom is that he (like most of his generation) prioritises Dead White Men. What about African or Asian writers? Because Asia (unlike Europe) didn't lose paper technology there is a much longer literary tradition. So what about:

The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (a nobel woman in 11th century Japan) is considered by many to be the first novel. It's long, and there are multiple translations into English (Ranking the translations) so a good contender for a year long read.

Monkey by Wu Cheng'en is much shorter and a Chinese classic folktale. Great fun, as those who remember the TV series from the 70s will know.

Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong is one of the four great classical novels in Chinese literature. Another long read.

Here are more suggestions: Good Reads Asian Classics.

Yes, I agree. Reading the complete works is certainly do-able. Depends on the author, of course. You could read all of Jane Austen’s novels in a year. In fact, you could probably read all of Dickens, if you read nothing else. I’m sure you could read the complete works of Jane Austen or the Brontes or Virginia Woolf faster than you could read Proust’s A La Recherche.

Interesting. I’ve heard it said that Persuasion is her masterpiece and that it’s the novel everyone pretends to love, though they secretly prefer Pride and Prejudice.

The first chapter of Return of the Native is a good example of what I mean. There is an awkward clunkiness to the sentences - too baggy and rattly. Frankly, some of his worst sentences are incomprehensible. But that’s mainly when he’s trying to be profound. When he settles down to tell a tale, the prose settles too, and is clear and pleasant. He’s also good at dialogue. Eustacia is wonderfully, fiercely eloquent. She’s one of my favourite female literary characters. I wanted to BE her when I was young. So sexy and cool.

Thank you for starting this! Dickens is one of my favourites and I would rate Bleak House above any of his others I’ve read, followed closely by Great Expectations.

I did some Proust at university and it’s quite heavy going but worthwhile - but he’s not an author to read to a deadline. It’s definitely writing to sink into and savour, and I just don’t have the concentration span these days. You might enjoy Alain de Botton’s book about Proust, which piqued my interest.

Hilary Mantel is an excellent choice. Her trilogy amounts to a good thousand or more pages I should think. To read all three, slowly and carefully, would take time. I generally ignore contemporary literature. I’ve totally lost faith in the literary establishment and can no longer trust their judgement. Books are increasingly praised just because their author ticks the right boxes, not because they are good. But I’m sure Mantel deserves a place in the canon (if the canon itself survives).

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

Thank you. I may just read Bleak House next.

My goal is the 50 book challenge with at least 50% from this list . Of those Bleak House will be near the top and I won't go near the George Elliot as hated Daniel Deronda with a passion.

@JaneyGee honestly, I wouldn't worry about not having read Wuthering Hights, I remember finding it so annoying I nearly had a book meets wall moment. Jane Eyre on the other hand, is one of my desert island books. (I don't have a desert island play list, I have a reading list.)
@Helloandgoodmorning2 do give Our Mutual Friend a go, its his best in my opinion.

The only challenge I've set myself so far is the Bible in a year, for which there's an app.
I need to have a think about a fiction challenge.

I'm also reading War and Peace a chapter a day as a read along and also after reading 86 books this year have set myself a target of 100 in 2024

It isn’t a question of prioritising them. He just believes that the greatest novels and plays and poems have been written by dead white men. And whether people like it or not, that’s the reality. You can ‘de-colonise’ as many libraries as you like, it doesn’t alter the fact that the greatest writers are Shakespeare, Dante, Proust, Milton, Homer, etc.

I totally ignore the literary establishment now. And I’m increasingly distrustful of the universities. They’ve all caved in to the woke bullies. If I want a guide to literature, I’ll stick to Bloom. He recommends books because he thinks they’re great, not because he approves of who wrote them. Inclusivity and diversity are meaningless words when it comes to great art. Maya Angelou is a bad poet. Philip Larkin is a superb poet. And the fact that Maya Angelou was a nice person, or that it’s time we had more poems by African-American women, doesn’t change that. Larkin was an asshole (snob, misogynist, misanthrope, etc), but he wrote some of the most beautiful, exquisite poems in English. I doubt the people who built the Taj Mahal were ‘nice’. It’s still a beautiful building.

Interesting. David Copperfield is my personal favourite. I think it’s richer and deeper than GE. It also has more depth and heart than BH. I’d even nominate it for greatest novel in English. The characters live with you forever. And all of life is there - the whole range of human experience, from grief and loneliness to love and loyalty. Wonderful book. Ripped my heart out though. I can still see David’s mother standing in a muddy lane in Norfolk waving goodbye to him for the last time. I’m welling up as I write this. Damn you Dickens, no one, and I mean no one, has ever made me cry like you do.

Both Nabokov and Harold Bloom consider it his masterpiece. And if those two agree on something, it may as well have come from God!

I love these debates. I mean which is Dickens’ best novel (or Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Hardy, D H Lawrence, etc).

Great thread! I try and have at least one big book a year. Last year it was "Bring out the bodies". This year I was thinking of reading my way around Europe, with a book from each country so possibly Dante would be a good choice but I think I would prefer Canterbury Tales.

Ds19 is halfway through "A la recherche" and enjoying it. After a few years of not reading at all, he has got back into classics in a big way.

I also have to fit in book club choices so that will probably be enough!

You might surprise yourself as I have done it a few times over a year and, if I recall correctly, it's about 10 minutes a day. I prefer following a reading plan that suggests a bit of old/new/psalms ever day. Otherwise it's easy to get bogged down around Deuteronomy!

Oops. I meant "The Mirror and the Light".

It isn’t a question of prioritising them. He just believes that the greatest novels and plays and poems have been written by dead white men. And whether people like it or not, that’s the reality. You can ‘de-colonise’ as many libraries as you like, it doesn’t alter the fact that the greatest writers are Shakespeare, Dante, Proust, Milton, Homer, etc.

And if you asked a Chinese literary critic they would have a completely different list of predominantly Chinese writers. Which might widen your horizons to read. It is ridiculous to suggest that some of the great and longest lasting civilisations in history didn't produce great literature that is comparable to the western canon. I've suggest three books that have been read for longer than Shakespeare, Dante, Proust, or Milton never mind the 19th century European novels you have mainly referenced. They all have been repeatedly translated into English. To dismiss them out of hand in the way that you just have sounds like racism frankly.

@JaneyGee OP if you loved DC so much - as did I! - I highly recommend Demon Cooperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver. It’s extremely faithful to DC and has a lot of heart and humour - you might enjoy.

@JaninaDuszejko I follow Footnotes and Tangents too 👋 and will be doing Wolf Crawl … slightly daunted!

But first.. @PermanentTemporary Im picking up Life and Fate in January - DH read it last year while I read War and Peace so now we’re going to swap.

Oh, I thought this was a thread about loving books, not the eighth trillionth racist rant about wokeness.

War and Peace has been on my to do for years. I think the best way to attack this is do a small amount a day like some of the threads on here. I just finished wuthering heights and have bought some more classics. Loved Crime and Punishment. I can recommend the Master and Margherita by Bulgakov. One of my all time favourites

Anyone doing the War and Peace read along or the Wolf Hall read along with Footnotes and Tangents? I've signed up to do the Wolf Hall crawl starting 1st January

Well I doff my cap to your son. I have bought myself a notebook and am going to read Proust slowly this year, making notes as I go along. My French isn’t great, but I can read quite a lot of Proust in the original. He isn’t so hard as people imagine. In fact, I find Joseph Conrad harder going. The real problem is the meandering, ever-flowing nature of his prose - the long sentences that you just can’t keep hold of.

For what it’s worth, this is how I’m approaching A La Recherche. Somebody told me not to ‘resist’ Proust, not to try and ‘hold on’ to the sentences or fight to reach the end. It’s so true. You can’t approach him like a conventional novelist. His works are an ever-flowing stream that you dip into, not a lake with clearly marked edges. With Dickens or Hardy or Austen, you read a story with a plot, one that moves briskly from beginning to middle to end, and that’s that - you either enjoy it or you don’t. Same goes for the Brontes, Tolkien, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Hemingway…and so on. If you try and read Proust as you’d read Wuthering Heights or The Forsyth Saga you’ll probably give up. If you’re impatient to reach the end so you can get on to something else, don’t bother. That was the mistake I made last time I tried. The best thing to do is to buy a readers guide, which outlines the plot clearly but in great detail. Once you’ve read that (and even that is a good 300 pages) you can hold the entire novel in your mind. It gives you a sense of the structure or outline. Then read Proust himself slowly.

Proust is a writer you’re supposed to live with. He’s one of those rare writers (like Shakespeare, Dante, Tolstoy, and a few others) who are so broad, so deep, and so wise, that you should be reading them constantly - memorising long passages, and sinking deeper and deeper into the work. I’m going to start reading him without ever hoping or expecting to reach the end. I believe A La Recherche is twice as long as War and Peace ffs!! Proust and Shakespeare should be like yoga and meditation and exercise. In other words, something you do every day in order to keep yourself healthy and sane. What he really teaches (so say the experts) is how to savour and enjoy every moment of existence. Virginia Woolf revered him and said that his work is like a miracle, because he makes everything seem vivid and intense. Another critic described it as HD prose. And I remember someone else saying that they read him constantly during lockdown and found that everything they looked at seemed more present and real - every leaf and flower and painting.

Wow @JaneyGee what a beautiful post.

Ah yes I had forgotten Master and Margherita..shame on me! Am going to re-read that this year too (tho maybe not in Russian this time as I'm a bit/very rusty....)

My Russian is rusty too. I’m trying to bring it back with Duolingo 😂