While waiting for Kate Constable’s annual reading roundup, I thought I’d attempt my own. My record-keeping is not great, but with the help of this blog, the history on my library account, book group lists and a look at my bookshelves…here it is. Sorry, no pie charts.
Grand total is 110 books. I think it’s probably a bit more; I vaguely remember a few stray novels and thrillers borrowed from friends or bought from the Op Shop on holiday. And I haven’t included books I didn’t read properly. If I lost patience and then skipped to the end, they don’t count.
So, in order:
Biography and memoir 23
Children’s and YA 21
Crime/Espionage 20
Literary fiction 14
History 10
Health, psychology, human behaviour 9
Bestsellers of Yesteryear 6
Literary criticism 4
Miscellaneous 3
I’m surprised and also not surprised; two books a week, more or less, sounds about right, since I can polish off a children’s novel in a couple of hours, and a crime novel in a day.
This little accounting project has made me examine my reading habits. It’s obvious that I do more in winter. Short days, long evenings, rain and cold. Because of dodgy wrists, I can’t knit as much as I used to, so that’s upped the score. I don’t watch much television, either. We do stream a few shows, but there’s not a lot of bingeing. And as a retired person, I have plenty of time.
But, I’m also a gardener, and I would have thought there’d be A LOT less reading action in the milder weather, but not so. I am, let’s face it, just a reading fool!
Which books have stayed with me? I’ve chosen one for each category.
The Rescuers by Margery Sharp, for the sheer pleasure and delight of a sophisticated, witty, exciting, funny and altogether delightful children’s junior novel. With wonderful Garth Williams illustrations. Sheer joy.
Windswept by Annabel Abbs. I think I’ve come to the end of my ‘women walking’ phase,but this one I plan to re-read. I enjoyed the way Abbs linked these women, some famous, some not, to her own landscapes and trails and weather and family and life experiences.
One of the more graceful (as in not clunky, not strained) examples of the genre.
Gate of Angels by Penelope Fitzgerald. A new writer for me. Reading joy! Perfect,short, witty, moving, and beautiful, beautiful, beautiful language.
The Slough House novels of Mick Herron provided more reading joy, though of a totally different kind. I’m yet to watch Slow Horses, the series based on the books, because we don’t have Apple. Bloody streaming, why aren’t all the ones I want to watch on the one service?
Unofficial Britain, for sheer mad weirdness. And for alerting me to the possibilities of streets and towns, ruined spaces, building sites, wasteland, edge-land.
As a kid, when I first read Alan Garner’s Elidor, I didn’t like it because it was set in an ugly, blasted urban streetscape, not Alderley Edge like The Weirdstone of Brisengamen. My bias has always been towards country, green, forest, old houses, stone, rivers, hills. Blinkers off!
Hugh McKay’s The Way We Are gave me a lot to think about. It’s on loan to a friend, but 
I’m going to read it again.
The Scent of Water by Elizabeth Goudge. I read this one ages ago, and dismissed it as inferior Goudge, but on giving it another go, I found it deeper and more moving than I’d realised.
My Lit Crit top pick was The Haunted Wood, and as for Miscellaneous, the ‘too hard to classify’ department – The Poetry of Birds, edited by Simon Armitage and Tim Dee, a gorgeous anthology picked up from the library book sale. I try to read poetry before I go to sleep a couple of times a week. I haven’t dreamed about birds yet, but when I watch the wrens and spinebills and honeyeaters in the morning, lovely phrases come to mind, by poets I probably would never read. Like Tennyson, from ‘The Throstle’:
‘Summer is coming, summer is coming
I know it, I know it, I know it.
Light again, leaf again, life again, love again,’
Yes, my wild little poet.
I will remember this next spring, when the birds are going crazy.