The good thing is that I’m finding a routine. The bad thing is I’m not yet great at it and so I’m behind on my usual end of year and start of year housekeeping. That said, I have spent enough time thinking about what my goals should be that I’ve come to a firm decision about Vanity Fair, the book that has been languishing on my reading list, moved from year to year with no reading movement.

I suppose the first thing to say, before continuing on my Thackeray decision, is to say that, broadly, I’m going back to a reading goal I had some previous years – I will read as much as I comfortably can. In looking at past goal posts I noticed I haven’t written one since 2021, which makes sense though still surprised me – I think, even now, I’m starting to forget just how stressed I was – and, more of a surprise was the fact I’d actually listed some goals. I thought I’d said ‘read as much as I comfortably can’ more often.

That dealt with, then, Thackeray – I have decided to leave his tome on my 2024 reading list and not carry it forward. I know – unthinkable! But it’s time. I have chosen to deliberately leave it in its unfinished…glory?… on that list instead of removing it as I usually do if I decide I haven’t read enough of a book to carry it over from one year to the next. Let it stand as a testament to my on-off history with it and also, if I do end up reading it some time, I think considering that new time to be a blank slate would be best. This all said, you may be surprised by the following. While I don’t want to make any hard and fast goals, I like the idea of some things I’ll aim to do if I can:

1) Here it goes: I’m going to see if I can read Vanity Fair, as though it’s new to me. I’m going to keep it in mind for when my reading time is not too busy and have a ponder.
2) I would like to finish Drums Of Autumn which I barely started in December. For all my talk of it being a tradition for me, I failed to read Outlander at Christmas.
3) I’d like to go back and finish the Venatrix Chronicles, my favourite fantasy series that I flew through right until the seventh and final book where I stopped because I wasn’t ready for it to end. I do not want to do another The Amber Spyglass and wait for years – that way leads to too much anticipation which will render any successful ending not good enough. (Not that I found the Pullman to be any objective success.)
4) I want to read more fantasy. TikTok and the romantasy trend is helping and I have some very popular books on my shelves waiting to be read.
5) I would like to re-start and read the whole of Burney’s Cecelia. I was very into it, in fact I checked my Kobo and I was 70% through volume one, but, likely, rabbits… Actually, the thing that concerns me most with Burney is that I don’t remember much at all of Evelina even though I found it an okay enough read. Please don’t tell Jane Austen.

And that’s plenty. If I do the above, great, if I don’t, I’ll have read other great things.

What are your reading goals for this year?

I thought I would have a look back at what I’ve written so far in these almost 15 years. I am thrilled that this list has changed from the last time I checked – for a very long time one of my most popular posts was of a very little known book and while I loved the book (I might as well include what it is) I don’t know if my review had any bearing on sales, which was disheartening. It’s also no longer available.

I love that newer posts are on here as well as some of my long-standing favourites and posts I worked hard on. They are in order of view counts and I have chosen to highlight the top 20:

1) What Happened To Faina At The End Of Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child?

I was incredibly happy with this post; I’d found the book compelling. With the book receiving a new edition, I wouldn’t be surprised if this post stays at number one for a while longer.

2) Alice In Wonderland: What Is The Appropriate Age?

This was to answer people who were coming to my site looking for, well, this answer. I found it a fascinating subject to write about because Alice seems younger than the text itself reads. (Though that could of course simply be down the the era.)

3) The Ending Of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening

I just had to explore this topic.

4) On The Reasons For Censoring Names And Places In Victorian Literature

In my early days of reading classics, why Victorian literature censored things was a question that took up my time. Me being me, I had to do some research.

5) How To Order Surnames

Still something I’m not perfect on without double checking, I admit to ordering my bookshelves by first name (though that does also help when the author is someone with three names, you can’t find any mention of them online, and you don’t know if the middle one is the first in a double-barrel or a middle name).

6) Did Scarlett Get Rhett Back?

Another question I asked myself that I had to explore. Was this the very early beginnings of my podcast? Quite possibly!

7) Is There Anything In The Fact Tolstoy Calls Both Karenin And Vronsky ‘Alexei’?

Something that definitely helped me get through the to-me slog that was Levin’s portions of Tolstoy’s book – study the parts I enjoyed.

8) Identity In Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca

The first exploratory post I wrote about the book and the first time I studied it.

9) Elizabeth Is Missing: Who Killed Sukey?

This did very well once the TV show started.

10) Frédéric Dard – Bird In A Cage

My review of the English translation of the classic French thriller. I don’t actually know why this has done so well.

11) The Reception Of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland From Contemporary Reviewers

A study I decided to do whilst enjoying a week or so of reading The Athenaeum.

12) Lisa See – Lady Tan’s Circle Of Women

My review of See’s still-currently-latest book. I’m thrilled this is on there; our podcast episode together has done very well, too.

13) The Symbolism Of The Sphinx In H G Wells’ The Time Machine

Not much to say about this one other than it interested me.

14) Looking At The Theme Of Love In Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca

Last night I had to write about Rebecca again.

15) On The Maude And Pevear & Volokhonsky Translations Of Anna Karenina

I remember well spending a good amount of time trying to read the Maude translation. I hated it and actually later found out – if I recall correctly – that the Maudes did not like the book. I think Pevear & Volokhonsky did, though, and thanks to them I finished the book.

16) Tender Is The Night And Do You Mind If I Pull Back The Curtain?

Why did this line get repeated so much? It annoyed me enough that I wrote about it.

17) The Character Progression Of Far From The Madding Crowd’s Gabriel Oak

She said she’d never read that book. She read that book. She loved that book. She let herself do a tiny bit of study of that book.

18) Jealousy In Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca

There I went again.

19) Dolly Alderton – Everything I Know About Love

My review of Alderton’s memoir. I’ve been surprised to see this one on the list but it did prove to be a popular book.

20) Zelda Fitzgerald In Midnight In Paris

I really liked the character.

Compiling this post – a kind of tertiary source, I suppose – was both nostalgic and intriguing. I’m still struggling to write to the perfectionist standards I can’t quite shake away, but I’ve done it once, I should be able to do it again. It also illustrates how my reading has changed over the years – my original progression to adult literature, to my minor focus on classics, and now on genre fiction.

Episode 114: Edward Carey (Edith Holler)

Charlie and Edward Carey talk at length about the arts and the theatre in the context of his book and in general. They also talk about Norwich as Edward’s book is his love letter to the city.

Please note there is a mild swear word in this episode.

If you’re unable to use the media player above, this page has various other options for listening as well as the transcript.

I mentioned in my last reading life post that I was working on the idea of soon adding to my reading list books I’d let fall by the way side; I think it would be a bit silly to focus too much on new books and not use the list as an opportunity to read some books I really should have already read.

I know I’m not the only one to have this happen – you acquire a book in whatever way, are very excited about it, and then all often have other books to read first or you decide to wait a bit before reading it, and then because you haven’t capitalised on that initial excitement you lose at least some measure of interest in the idea of reading it. The book is no longer new and shiny. The honeymoon period is over.

(It was quite damning writing that because it made me think of the times I have read a book when it was still exciting and how – as long as the book is at least an average read – it categorically is a better experience to read when the iron is hot.)

So I guess my main question was, can that excitement be regained, reconstructed?

I think it depends on seeing it as a new start, effectively wiping the excitement slate clean, or perhaps alternatively, leaning in to why you were excited originally… so long as your excitement extended beyond ‘new book!’ Certainly you have to let go of any guilt or feelings of burden you might have over not having read the book already. I think the only big issue with achieving this would be if you received the book with an effectively time-limited period in which to read it – say a review copy you didn’t get to (I used to get a fair number of unsolicited books). But it’s not impossible even then.

I’ve a particular book in mind as I write this: N M Kelby’s White Truffles In Winter. I acquired it so long ago I had to check my archives to find out whether I’d bought it or been sent it for review… I got it in August 2013 only three years into blogging and when I was yet to always declare whether I’d purchased or received a book. So I haven’t a clue.

It was so long ago I had it on my (albeit later abandoned) Long Awaited list… in 2019. It was so long ago the author isn’t on social media or to be found online at all – for whatever reason she hasn’t published anything since. (I will avoid making any theories here!)

I remember being taken by the title, cover, and the thought that it might be a perfect choice for Christmas, which I think is understandable. I left it for longer than I’d planned and then found out the title didn’t much reflect the contents; it was simply one of the first of those books with a title that worked as a marketing tactic – oh it did indeed!

I think of it now and then but the magic of before is gone; I wonder if I have to do something else in regards to that loss, perhaps just accept that it’s long gone and just read the book regardless.

I’d like to know from you all: what do you do about books you’ve left unread for too long? Do you get to reading many of them later? If so, how has the experience of reading them been?

Episode 111: Elaine Chiew (The Light Between Us)

Charlie and Elaine Chiew discuss early 20th century Singaporean photography and its influences on Elaine’s novel in depth, which involves looking at social issues and the history of the qipao. We also dive into the time travel aspects and the use of Chinese spirit-mediums.

If you’re unable to use the media player above, this page has various other options for listening as well as the transcript.

All the near-recent posts about The New York Times’s Best Books of the 21st Century – I’ve linked to it but it’s behind a paywall – got me thinking about ‘best of’ lists in general and where they could apply to my own reading. Usually, or at least until recent years, any ‘best ofs’ I created were from my year round ups, the best five or so books I’d read in any given year. But people have been talking about what was missed – that it was full of literary fiction, that it neglected African literature, and a variety of my own research on lists have led me to realise I rarely use what I’ve read in this manner and that, on occasion, I probably should.

A ‘genre’ I don’t remark upon often, and admittedly don’t really read all that much of, is translated fiction, and this is rather silly because I tend to love reading it. But the proof is in the numbers and I’ve gone through all the data I have of my reading which extends from about half-way through 2009 (I wasn’t keeping track of dates back then) to last month, September 2024, and the answer is that I’ve read 41 books in translation out of a few hundred books in total. When my slow reading speed is considered it’s not absolutely terrible, but I did think I had read more non-English works.

I owe much of my reading in translation to my former reviewer relationships with Peirene Press and Pushkin Press which both fell by the wayside when contacts moved on. I have read some absolutely stellar books thanks to them and in Pushkin’s case I went on, much later, to invite two of their authors onto my podcast (Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen, episode 33; Nicolai Houm episode 81).

I’ve gone through the list of 41 and narrowed it down to those books I rate really highly and of which the passage of time has not blurred my knowledge. I’ve left out age-old classics – Tolstoy and Thomas More will be around for years to come. I love the idea that I’m bringing old favourites back to a front page, even if it’s just my own.

Here we go. The two years given are for the publication in the original language and then English translation.

Ayelet Gundar-Goshen: One Night, Markovitch (Hebrew, 2012/2015, translated by Sondra Silverston)
A man with an unremarkable face and his friend with the amazing moustache decide to join men heading to Germany to save Jewish women from the Nazis and bring them home to Israel. Full of humour, this is no less a book with a lot to say. It was even better than I’d hoped. Looking back on it now, it is no less relevant today than it was when it was first published – in various parts of the story one of the main characters goes to work in the morning and Gundar-Goshen will throw in a phrase of two about him using a gun on some Palestinians, a deliberately casual reference with an unapologetically shocking result.

Bernhard Schlink: The Reader (German, 1995/2015, translated by Carol Brown Janeway)
At fifteen, Michael has an affair with an older woman and years later sees her once more, this time in a war trial. Fantastic. I remember this being very literary and one of those books that can seem mundane at first before becoming shocking, but at the same time gives so much more.

Éric Chacour: What I Know About You (French, 2023/2024, translated by Pablo Strauss)
Writing to Dr Tarek, our second-person narrator tells us Tarek’s history and over time we learn who our narrator is and why he is so into Tarek’s story. (I should note the plot is of an Egyptian man born in the 1960s who becomes a doctor like his father, later gets married, and then one day falls for his male assistant.) Stunning – the plot is well done and everything about the structure and writing is superb. It’s been a few weeks since I finished it and I still think the writing is the defining aspect for me, though the look at various social issues was incredibly interesting.

Irène Némirovsky: Suite Française (French, 2004/2004, translated by Sandra Smith)
As the Germans invade and conquer France, thousands of refugees move to areas that are still free and later adapt to life as the German soldiers move to live amongst them. An excellent book. I would like to read it again; I meant to around the time the film came out, but hearing that the film only focused on one of the plot threads and may have created a conclusion for it (Nemirovsky was killed in the Holocaust and didn’t finish the book, though we have some of her notes) I set the whole idea aside. I do still have another of Nemirovsky’s books to read, in terms of unread books on my shelf, and need to go back to her work in general.

Marie-Sabine Roger: Soft In The Head (French, 2008/2016, translated by Frank Wynne)
A man who speaks of his lack of education and poor childhood meets an old woman in the park and they strike up a friendship over pigeons, books, and learning. Utterly fantastic, there are so many different themes to this book and they’re all handled excellently; and it’s a book wherein I heard the character in my head rather than my usual ‘voice’ – so well written and translated. I remember it being a very fun book.

Nicolai Houm: The Gradual Disappearance Of Jane Ashland (Norwegian, 2016/2018, translated by Anna Paterson)
A woman wakes up in a tent in a Norwegian National Park, knowing how she got there; scenes from the past couple of months show how she came to be in such a place. This is a novel about grief rather than a thriller – though it has an element of that – and a very good one at that. I re-read this only a couple of years ago so it remains fresh – there is a lot of things that you, as a reader, can think about here, and the ending is left somewhat open.

Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen: The Rabbit Back Literature Society (Finnish, 2006/2014, translated by Lola Rogers)
Ella becomes the long-awaited 10th member of a society that involves the country’s greatest writers – but are they the greatest writers, really? A very good look at ideas and writing in general. Weird ideas, suitable ideas – there’s lots up for interpretation.

Seishi Yokomizo: The Honjin Murders (Japanese, 1946/2019, Louise Heal Kawai)
A couple on their wedding night are murdered in the annex building of the family estate; a three-fingered man was seen around the place the night before and his hand prints are on the wall, but why did it happen? An excellent 1940s novella that is a lot more about the ‘why’ than the ‘who’. This is the first in a series focused on fictional detective Kosuke Kindaichi.

Véronique Olmi: Beside The Sea (French, 2001/2010, Adriana Hunter)
A mother takes her sons to the seaside for a holiday that may end badly. Brilliant, and provides a lot to think about. When I say it may end badly, I mean it, however in terms of Olmi’s look at mental illness and showing why people do what they do, it’s stunning.

What would be on your list?

Episode 108: Mark Stay (The Witches Of Woodville)

Charlie and Mark Stay (The Witches Of Woodville) discuss writing humour into wartime, using period-correct language as well as slang, why community is important and how much we’ve lost over the decades, and the metric ton of projects he has on the go.

If you’re unable to use the media player above, this page has various other options for listening as well as the transcript.

A couple of years ago I made what was, if I recall correctly, an in the moment, flip of a switch decision to stop including ratings in my reviews. (As a lover of information I feel I should act accordingly – the last review to include a rating was Natasha Miller’s Relentless which I posted in 2022.)

I say flip of a switch decision – at the time it was. It was a kind of ‘am I doing this darn thing of going with my new thought that I don’t want to rate any more, or not?’

But in the bigger context of my blog as a whole, I’d been thinking about ratings for a long time. In March 2014, I wrote about my 3/5 rating. Three months later that June, I wrote about ratings more broadly. And I returned again in 2018, where I spoke about my conflicting thoughts. My usage of the same graphic as those posts for this post is very intentional!

So in all, my dropping ratings has been a long time coming. I do remember wondering about it a lot over the four years it was in my mind (if we assume my feeling conflicted begun in 2018).

Do I feel better for it? I have to say I do. Whilst I may be a sucker for categorisation and data and statistics (outside of a maths lesson), my original thoughts that it would make me feel more free did turn out to be correct. One of the benefits is that it has made me be clearer in my writing. This is not to say I wasn’t clear but when you’ve a numbered system to fall back on, you can think on occasion – for example when a review is proving tricky to write – that if all else fails, the numbers will do the explaining.

That worked in my head when I was greener, before I understood just how differently each person views numbers to another, but it doesn’t work any more. I think the first time I pondered on the idea was when I saw that a lot of people used an out-of-ten rating system – I never saw the point in that… but then I started using half numbers within my out-of-five system. I did, however, continue to not quite understand the out-of-ten system; it always seemed like too many numbers and, somehow, more complicated than using half numbers.

And this actually leads me to my next point – perhaps I should have realised a lot earlier than I did how differently people did see rating numbers. Having been blogging for so long, and just having read around the subject of books for so long, I’ve learned a lot about how numbers are viewed in context. To me a 3/5 or, bringing in others’ systems, a 5 or 6/10 means a pretty average book, one that’s not bad, per se, but could have been better. For others, though this is rare, that rating means the book’s not at all good. And then there are the people who would say a 7/10 is a very good book, which is something I can’t quite get my head around. Some of these people will never give 10/10 – by their own confession – because either absolute perfection is impossible or, for a subset of this ‘some’, once they give a 10/10 that means any further ratings would be incredibly hard to assign.

I don’t think I’ve ever properly explained my own ratings. Originally that would’ve been due to a lack of self-awareness, in that surely everyone felt the same way. But later it was in fact due to a bit of embarrassment, and that’s because my rating system came from The Daily Mail and as I was getting older and moving away from the certain isolation you have when still a child and living with parents, I was starting to realise that my values did not align with the newspaper I had, prior, happily read from cover to cover (I had no experience of any other papers).

While The Mail’s rating system isn’t exactly political, and it’s something I can still agree with, certainly discussing the source felt problematic. I now have stronger critical thinking skills and an understanding that choices made in childhood are limited by what you are taught and what is available to you, which is usually less than what is available to you in adulthood.

So the ratings were as follows: 1 – poor. 2 – adequate. 3 – worth reading/watching. 4 – good. 5 – very good (which, for lack of a 6 rating, I viewed as being synonymous with ‘perfect’). I added my own half points to get around the pesky problems when, for example, a book was just that bit more than ‘worth reading’.

And these ratings could still serve me if I wanted them to, indeed I do keep a rating in my personal tracking which allows for an ‘objective’ rating (I still believe in reviewing and rating as objectively as one can) and, if my personal opinion in full subjective terms is different, a second, personal, rating. (I often opt for two. For example, I can’t deny that the Christmas I read Outlander was massively fun and memorable due to that reading and that I now like to read a book of the series a year at about the same time but, objectively, there are issues with it.)

I mentioned above that no longer including ratings in my reviews has been freeing and that it made me a better, clearer, writer. I think it also helps my real thoughts to stand out. Reducing your opinion to a number, no matter that you have text to back it up, means some of the meaning of your words are lost. It means there’s also a big chance a reader of your review could say ‘too long; didn’t read’ and skip to the rating, and while I can’t argue about how people prioritise their time, you do lose nuances when you’ve got numbers. Do numbers mean you’ve an additional review, a sort of second review? Yes. Do they mean your well-laid-out thoughts could be lost in a sea of numbers? Yes. I was also just starting to feel unhappy including ratings, which I needed to listen to.

I don’t think this change will be reversed – this is partly why it took so long for me to start leaving ratings out – I’m one for systems and frameworks on my blog. Likewise I’m not going to go back to older reviews and remove ratings – I stand with those who see deleting older work as deleting the progression you’ve made in your chosen subject and those reviews are testament to who I was when they were written, and a diary of sorts. (My review of Pride And Prejudice leaves much to be desired, no matter how much I loved the book!)

I do think, had I done it much earlier, I might have failed – there’s a daunting shadow that hangs over you when you picture your text having to do more heavy lifting and you feel your writing isn’t yet there. But I think it was the right time and added to my recent restructuring of the format of my reviews I can say I’m very happy.