This time last year a friend told me that rather than drawing up the usual list of new year’s resolutions, she was simply setting herself two targets for 2014: to complete 100 runs each of suitable length to warrant decent exercise, and to read 100 books. I can’t say I got on board with the running, but I was intrigued by her literary plans. Was this a huge number of books to read in 365 days, or just the average bookworm’s quotient? How did my own reading shape up? I began keeping a list.
As December came to a close, I realised that I was leafing through the pages of my 163rd book of the year. I think it's fair to say that I'd read plentifully and broadly, but perhaps most notably, rather gluttonously. Looking back over my list it showed that I'm a gannet when it comes to an author or genre I love. I discovered the bibliomemoir in January and, captivated by its myriad forms, devoured as many as possible. I read my first Rachel Cusk in February then quickly bought up her back catalogue while waiting for her latest, Outline, to be published in September.
After years of living with a smattering of Muriel Spark paperbacks I'd picked up over the years sitting on my bookshelves, I finally settled down with A Far Cry From Kensington, before falling immediately in love with everything Spark wrote as I read her throughout the spring. Early summer was marked by an intense infatuation with Joan Didion's writing, which then developed more broadly into an obsession with female essayists that saw me through to the autumn.
There’s an argument to be made for this kind of voracious consumption of an author’s entire oeuvre in near enough as one sitting as possible, but I wonder if, as with a similarly copious meal, sheer quantity means I run the risk of not fully appreciating the nuanced flavours of the different delicacies on offer? Once I’ve guzzled up their novels, I can often barely distinguish the taste of an author’s offering from another of his/her works. I’m also repeatedly left feeling bereft when I realise there’s quite literally nothing more of their work for me to read.
On turning the final page of my proof copy of Sarah Waters' The Paying Guests back in May, my first thought was how foolish I'd been to read it so quickly. It hadn't even been published and I already had years to wait until her next offering.
This year I shall be starting another list (in competition with the length of last year's perhaps), but I'm making a couple of accompanying reading resolutions. I'm sick to death of marriage thrillers and can't bear the idea of reading yet another permutation of this overused plot. Thus, no matter how many people hail any forthcoming thrillers as "the new Gone Girl", I'm going to steer clear. I also feel like 2014 hit saturation point when it came to dystopian fiction. Many of the grim visions of the future on offer were brilliantly executed and written by acclaimed authors not necessarily regular practitioners of the genre – from Chang-rae Lee's On Such A Full Sea, David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks to Michel Faber's The Book of Strange New Things to name but a few – nevertheless I need a break from all the doom and gloom.
Most of all, I'm increasingly dubious of the comparative tendency that seems to have become the norm when writing jacket blurbs. I found myself taken in by lofty claims on more than one occasion during the course of the previous 12 months – most memorably by a novel sold as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie meets Nineteen Eighty-Four (two towering works that nothing should be compared to lightly), simply, as far as I could make out, because it dealt with the subject of teenage claustrophobia in a 1970s girls' school. This sort of literary name-dropping has become commonplace, suggesting a worrying trend to pride derivativeness above originality. It also as likely as not sets the title in question up for a rather spectacular fall, invariably leaving the reader bitterly disappointed. I want the Jamesian moral mystery the book claims to be, not the novel I actually find myself reading.
But even as I resolve not to be so gullible this year, I can’t help but think that perhaps my literary greediness is partly to blame. If I hadn’t read the entire catalogue of the original author whose name is summoned up for comparison, would I be anticipating the rewrite quite so eagerly?
Thus, in making my final resolution for 2015, I’m taking my lead from that most tried and tested of new year’s resolutions: the diet. No more overindulging in favourite authors, from now on it’s smaller portion sizes and a little of everything in moderation.
Lucy Scholes is a freelance journalist who lives in London
