Yet More Reading

Following the habit I adopted at the start of the pandemic in March 2020, I've continued my chain-reading habit every day ever since, and this past year I managed to read thirty-six novels and a short story. Here they are in the order in which I read them.

Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Howards End by E. M. Forster

The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Tóibín

The Ballad of the Sad Café by Carson McCullers

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler

Falconer by John Cheever

The Folding Star by Alan Hollinghurst

Something New (1915) by P. G. Wodehouse

The Woman Who Walked Into Doors by Roddy Doyle

Party Going by Henry Green

Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell

The Book of Evidence by John Banville

The Natural by Bernard Malamud

Rabbit, Run by John Updike

Pictures from an Institution by Randall Jarrell

A Girl in Winter by Philip Larkin                               

The Fortnight in September by R. C. Sherriff

Last Orders by Graham Swift                                                 

The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth                                             

Three Bedrooms in Manhattan by Georges Simenon            

The Beach by Cesare Pavese                                        

Over the Frontier by Stevie Smith

Cutter and Bone by Newton Thornburg

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

A Year in the Death of Ricardo Reis by José Saramago

Voices in the Evening by Natalia Ginzburg

Angels on Toast by Dawn Powell

The Actual by Saul Bellow

Foster by Claire Keegan

The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O’Connor

A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter

Cold Spring Harbor by Richard Yates

Despair by Vladimir Nabokov

“Then We Were Three” by Irwin Shaw

The Dean’s December by Saul Bellow

As always, I followed no itinerary in my choices - I went, as the saying goes, wherever the spirit moved me. The novels that had the greatest effect on me were never either the best or most famous. I thought Howards End, for example, was a muddled book, but just the sort of muddle Forster meant it to be. Wuthering Heights, the most famous on the list, was something of a slog. Evidently Emily Brontë wanted to include the whole of her odd world in it, and it is cumulatively evocative of it.

Only one of them was really disappointing - Cutter and Bone, which wasn't nearly as good as the film. Of all the books, the ones I liked and enjoyed reading most were: The Long Goodbye, with its beautiful evocation of mid-century Los Angeles; Something New, with its exquisite ending; Pictures from an Institution, very funny and very moving; The Fortnight in September, a real find and a loving portrait of middle class English life; The Ghost Writer, a strangely imaginative glimpse by an extremely precocious fledgling writer inside the lives of three people he encounters in a wintry retreat; Three Bedrooms in Manhattan, one of Simenon's "hard" novels that shows us a familiar locale and a fully grown-up love from the inside; Foster, a very gentle tale of a little girl's discovery of the true meaning of family love; and A Sport and a Pastime, that catches moods and (sometimes erotic) moments in time that are unforgettable. 

The novels that I look forward to reading again some day on a desert island are Updike's Rabbit, Run, which I misjudged on a first reading, Pictures from an Institution, replete with intelligence, wit, and love, and A Sport and a Pastime. Yet, as Frost wrote, knowing how way leads on to way, I doubt if I should ever go back.