Reading report
My reading year has just ended; it goes from May to April, with a day of grace, May 1, because stuff happens.
I had two targets. I met the easier one: completing 51 books. I needed this number to replenish my yearly average, which had dipped.
I almost met the harder target (52, or 1/wk) and was tearing through William Morris’s Wood Beyond the World (1894), a sex-fever of a book, when I fell asleep.
Earlier, I had finished Don’t Tell Alfred, Nancy Mitford’s last novel. This year I’ll read her biographical writings (1/mo): Madame de Pompadour, Votaire in Love, The Sun King, and Frederick the Great. A heavy dose of France-love. (Don’t Tell Alfred also is set in France; the narrator’s husband, an Oxford theology don, is made ambassador.) I may or may not read Nancy’s edited volume, Noblesse Oblige. Then, two books by Jessica Mitford; a volume of the Mitford sisters’ letters to each other; and, if I am still keen, the writings of Diana, one of the Mitford Fascists.
I still read Fielding and Shakespeare in light doses. The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, with annotations and critical essays, will be tallied as one book. A volume by Michael Frayn, Plays: 4, consisting of Copenhagen, Democracy, and one other play, is on the docket. It will be counted as one book. I intend to read all of the Little House books in order for the first time. My edition is in two volumes. I’ll record the series as nine separate books. The arbitrariness is obscene.
I don’t count the very short children’s books I read to Samuel and Daniel.
I am some ten cantos from the end of the Paradiso after all these years. I am dragging booty. I get through about a canto a month. The poem seems more and more alien to me, the further up into Heaven I get; Purgatory was more my level.
I had two targets. I met the easier one: completing 51 books. I needed this number to replenish my yearly average, which had dipped.
I almost met the harder target (52, or 1/wk) and was tearing through William Morris’s Wood Beyond the World (1894), a sex-fever of a book, when I fell asleep.
Earlier, I had finished Don’t Tell Alfred, Nancy Mitford’s last novel. This year I’ll read her biographical writings (1/mo): Madame de Pompadour, Votaire in Love, The Sun King, and Frederick the Great. A heavy dose of France-love. (Don’t Tell Alfred also is set in France; the narrator’s husband, an Oxford theology don, is made ambassador.) I may or may not read Nancy’s edited volume, Noblesse Oblige. Then, two books by Jessica Mitford; a volume of the Mitford sisters’ letters to each other; and, if I am still keen, the writings of Diana, one of the Mitford Fascists.
I still read Fielding and Shakespeare in light doses. The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, with annotations and critical essays, will be tallied as one book. A volume by Michael Frayn, Plays: 4, consisting of Copenhagen, Democracy, and one other play, is on the docket. It will be counted as one book. I intend to read all of the Little House books in order for the first time. My edition is in two volumes. I’ll record the series as nine separate books. The arbitrariness is obscene.
I don’t count the very short children’s books I read to Samuel and Daniel.
I am some ten cantos from the end of the Paradiso after all these years. I am dragging booty. I get through about a canto a month. The poem seems more and more alien to me, the further up into Heaven I get; Purgatory was more my level.