Reading resolutions

This is a good time to take stock of the previous year and plan for the next one. For me the reading highlight of 2013 had to be Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate. It towered above everything else. What a book, and what a man.
The crime novel that’s stuck in my mind is one that I read at the beginning of the year: Asa Larrson’s Until Thy Wrath Be Past: brilliantly atmospheric, many-layered, haunting. Just superb.Black Skies by Arnaldur Indridason, another outstanding writer and a favourite of mine, deserves an honourable mention. But what about non-fiction? I didn’t read very much last year, but I am very impressed by Hermione Lee’s biography of Penelope Fitzgerald, which I have just finished reading and will blog about in due course.
It’s been a year when I’ve done a fair bit of rereading and perhaps my resolution could be to read a bit more adventurously. Being in a book group helps as I read books suggested by other people and am often glad I did. Having said that, every year we choose an optional big read, something that we’d struggle to read for one of our monthly meetings, and this year it is Middlemarch, which I have read umpteen times but am very happy to read again. And I’ll be rereading the Maigret novels as they are reissued by Penguin, one a month, in the order they were written (great idea: some of them are difficult to get hold of).
But I’ll be trying some new writers, too – Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities – is our current reading group choice, and maybe I’ll follow Mrs Peabody’s example and join her on a reading challenge. So lots to look forward to, but I am well aware that I could be writing more, so that’s my main resolution: to produce more for others to read. So watch this space . . .
A very happy New Year to my readers.