Judging from my latest blog posts, one would have thought that I'd not done much reading lately. In fact, I was doing pretty well with my reading until not so long ago – I've just been too lazy to blog about it. I finally read books which I actually owned instead of just buying new ones, got in some ambitious reads and finished books I had previously discarded after only having read a few pages. For a while, I was feeling pretty smug, and then the inevitable happened: I got stuck.
The problem is not when you don't get any further with one book, but when they pile up. My first mistake was when I vaingloriously decided that it was finally time to read Sketches by Boz from cover to cover. It's the only major work by Dickens I've only read a fraction of, and that simply wouldn't do. Not for the first time, though, I soon came to a halt, and not by any means because the book is bad or un-Dickensian. There's a lot of humorous descriptions to make one chuckle. The problem is that because of the genre, the sketches are mostly just that: descriptions, with little dialogue or story. With Dickens, I want human drama, preferably with a lot of cutting lines by villains and suchlike. I can stand descriptive parts of his novels because they're so brilliantly written and often funny, but without a plot to hook me I find even the wittiest tableau of a London street hard going.
All right, then, so maybe I could wait with Sketches by Boz a bit longer and read it more piecemeal. But there were other substantial books I could try. I looked forward to Kept by D.J. Taylor, clearly as Neo-Victorian as they come. It was a bit hefty – which is only natural when you want to emulate the Victorian novel – so maybe not ideal to lug to work for my lunch break. My plan was this: at home, I would read Kept, and at work I would dip into The New Penguin Book of American Short Stories. Ambitious, yes, but I could take it: just look at how easily I got into Wuthering Heights a couple of months ago!
You can guess what happened next. I never knew Yanks could be such a downcast lot. Nothing wrong with the writing, it was just so depressing. After four short stories, I started on the Nathaniel Hawthorne one, stopped after about a page with a disgruntled "OK, so she's totally a witch" and set this volume aside as well.
As for Kept, it's annoyingly well-written, which means I have no excuse to give up on it until after a mandatory hundred pages. But the plot lines so far just don't interest me. The art of poaching wild birds' eggs? Some ghastly madwoman locked up somewhere? I need to persevere, but what did I find when I last tried? A lengthy description of a London street!
What conclusions can be drawn? Nothing most readers don't already know: that it's darned hard to find a reading strategy which allows you to virtuously work your way through the piles of books you've bought without getting stuck somewhere. When I was younger, I tried the tactic of alternating between Ambitious Book Projects and self-indulgence reads, but that put too much pressure on the latter and involved far too many ABPs for my liking.
This time around, I went into a regular self-indulgence bonanza. I re-read the last three Thursday Next novels (I've had my doubts about some of Jasper Fforde's latest novels, but the Thursday Next ones really are brilliant); an old Swedish translation of Betty Cavanna's A Touch of Magic, a delicious example of having your cake and eating it when it comes to historical fiction (you're invited to tut-tut over the frivolous Shippen girls while at the same time revelling in the drama of balls and suitors); and finally a Young Adult novel irresistibly called Do You Ship It? I wasn't sure at first, but yes, I did.
Will all this self-indulgence reading give me strength to start up with slightly heavier stuff again? I've started on The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden, but the jury's still out. Pros: if I know Arden, there will be folklore elements and possibly a villain in the works. Cons: death, disaster and World War One.
