How many books can you read in a year? It recently occurred to me that life is far too short to read everything I want to read. There simply aren’t enough hours in the day or years in a lifetime. So I’ve set myself a challenge for 2015 – to be organised about what I read, to make deliberate choices and above all to emphasis variety. But there has to be quality there too. I haven’t any time to waste.
So here’s the pick of the books I’ve read in January. First up were two Agatha Christie novels. The first, Ordeal by Innocence was a re-read and the second, Death in the Clouds, new to me. I thoroughly enjoyed both. For me Agatha Christie is a master craftsman, able to weave together the intricate threads of a plot in remarkably few words, and at the same time create a view of her world with all its idiosyncrasies. Agatha Christie paperbacks are readily available in secondhand bookshops.
Next I moved on to Stoner by John Williams (First published 1965, Vintage classic reprint 2012). Another brilliantly crafted book and a beautifully written one, it tells the story of William Stoner, an American academic, who seems to stumble through life with a sense of not being quite sure what he is actually doing there. I was hooked from the first page although it’s hard to analyse why. Perhaps it’s just simply enough to say I recognised him. I would like to have known him.
And then something completely different; a memoir entitled Love, Nina written by Nina Stibbe (Penguin paperback 2014) telling the story of the time she spent as a nanny for a family in London in the 1980s. This well written and very humorous book particularly resonated with me as I too worked as a nanny for a London family in my gap year. Nina Stibbe has a delightfully light and self-deprecating voice and a casual way of dropping big names (Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller for example) into her writing, adding both depth and interest. I see she has also written a novel and I look forward to checking that out – though maybe not this year.
My final book this month was Margaret Forster’s Good Wives? (Vintage paperback 2002) With a mixture of biographical writing, and personal reflection, Forster tells the story of three ‘good wives’ from different times (Mary Livingstone, Fanny Stevenson and Jennie Lee) and tries to work out just what it is that makes a good wife. It’s an interesting premise for a book, and generally a good read, though it suffers from being neither biography nor memoir, falling somewhere between the two. Perhaps inevitably I am left feeling dissatisfied and wanting to know more – about the people whose stories she tells and about her.
So I end the month by adding yet more books to my list – further biographies of the three ladies, and re-reads of Margaret Forster’s novels. Not quite what I’d originally planned.
