“Planning is good, I think, but being spontaneous and knowing when to let go of things is even better” I was writing in December of last year, as I was planning my reading for 2024. Was I right! My English-language reading led me to foreseeable yet unforeseen paths in the first half of the year and I did drop some of my planned reading along the way.
Katherine Mansfield took up most of my reading time this year so far and I am so happy to have joined the Literature Cambridge course in April-May, which focused on her life and work. Their lectures prompted me to go deeper into her writing and form my own thoughts about her work.
what I read
The Music at Long Verney was part of my introduction to Sylvia Townsend Warner’s writing, alongside with Lolly Willowes, which I read at the end of 2023. Her stories are little treasures which reveal a hidden side of being human, and when you read them, you feel they are so true and wonder how you didn’t see that side of the world until then.
D.H. Lawrence is also an author to whom I found my way this year. Lady Chatterley’s Lover had been lying on my shelf waiting for the perfect time for me to read it and understand it. It was a lovely coincidence to have read Lawrence just before Katherine Mansfield, with whom I spent a good two months of the past six. The two authors were close friends and, together with their wife, respective husband, they lived together for some months in 1916 in an attempt at creating an artists’ community. The experiment failed, though.
This year I read Mansfield’s 1920 short story collection, Bliss and Other Stories and revisited The Garden Party and Other Stories. ‘The Garden Party’ and ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ are probably some of Mansfield most-read short stories, but there are so many gems to discover. The darkness in ‘Je ne parle pas francais’ redefines the concept of a despicable character, while her lesser-known New Zealand stories really bring out the overlooked lives of people who, in the English colonies, looked for hope and found only misery.
And because you can’t say Katherine Mansfield without saying Virginia Woolf, I started preparing for my Woolf summer course as soon as I was done with Mansfield. I read Jacob’s Room for the first time this year and it was a real shock. I know her early work and her masterpieces, but this transition-novel really was a missing piece for me. In addition to that, I just finished my fourth reread of To the Lighthouse, which gave me the deepest sense of awe, and created huge expectations of my first encounter with The Waves next month.
On the side of Romanian-language reading I was very invested in Mircea Cărtărescu and couldn’t help but wonder how he sounds in English. His most well-known work, the short story collection Nostalgia has been translated in English for a couple years and made for a good pick. The translation did sound bumpy occasionally, but I can only appreciate and be happy that my favourite Romanian-language writer is now available to a world audience.
what I haven’t read and won’t read in 2024
I decided to let go of all Japanese authors this year, in the end. It wasn’t easy because I did want to continue Yukio Mishima’s tetralogy and was looking forward to some Japanese short stories. But letting go of some means also gaining some. My focus on Woolf and Mansfield so far has put me in the mood of English classics, and I’ll follow that up with Dickens and Wilde later this year.
what I bought
When it’s about buying books in Romanian or German I can (mostly) keep myself in check. This is not the case for English-language fiction. I travel to England once a year and the occasion is so special, that it needs to be marked with buying books. Second-hand books come of course on top of that, especially if your favourite shop lures you in with discount vouchers. It’s not even my fault.
The good news is that each of these second-hand books I bought (so far) is covered by a perfectly rational reason. I will need Great Expectations and The Heat of the Day for a London in literature course I’m planning to join in autumn. I watched Alias Grace the series and I urgently had to own the book. Sylvia Townsend Warner’s short story volume Winter in the Air is of course unmissable for the end of the year, and Pride and Prejudice was just too cheap. See? Perfect reasons.
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I welcomed 2024 with a story in my mind. I wanted to let go of the old and embrace the new. I think I did achieve that to some extent, and I am also slowly starting to realize you cannot have the new without the old. It’s all being built in layers and layers which melt into each other, embrace each other and reject each other. Like my revelation this year when re-reading ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ for the nth time and just realizing what is actually going on in there. How could I have seen the new had I not had the past under my belt?
your thoughts?