Last year, I challenged myself to read (alongside whatever else) a very specific 12.427kg or (I think) 33908.807cm3 of books – i.e., twelve absurdly outsized volumes, of which I will now concede the physical dimensions of Tale of Genji and Vollmann’s Imperial were not necessarily disproportionate. (Unheralded, and at the other end of the scale, I also decided to read one Clifford Simak and one John Dickson Carr per month, even though they were all sensibly scaled A-format paperbacks.)
This year, my only writing-related reading commitment is 200 contemporary short stories about climate change (eleven collections), for which I will also read three older classic anthologies.
So I feel the urge to multiply the challenges this year:
- Read all 20 remaining titles in the Great Writers series (which I blogged about quite a bit last month, beginning here)
2. Read more of the trilogies/series that are languishing in all these boxes, still unpacked fifteen months after moving house: Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End tetralogy (1924–26 ); Arturo Barea’s The Forging of a Rebel trilogy (1941–46); Michael Moorcock’s Pyat Quartet (1981–2006); Madison Smarrt Bell’s Haiti trilogy (1995–2004), of which I have the first two volumes; Alastair Reynolds’s Poseidon’s Children trilogy (2012–15); Malka Older’s Centennial Cycle (2016–18), of which I’ve already read and liked the first book; and B. Catling’s Vorrh trilogy (2012–18), or at least the unnecessarily large hardback edition I have of the first volume. And depending on how reading Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga (1906–21) for 1. goes, I’ll probably read the other Forsyte trilogies: A Modern Comedy (1925–28) and End of the Chapter (1931–32).
3. I will continue to make my way through the stacks of Simak and Carr, but at a slower pace this year. Instead, I will read at the rate of slightly more than one a month, eleven Peter Van Greenaways and four Abraham Polonskys.
All of these plans are subject to change.
And probably doomed to failure.
Especially when thing like this arrive in the post.
Mark Bould 