Tales Of The Gurrier

Do you read, dear Reader? I read. I read all day. But what do I read, aye, there’s the rub. Email in the morning and then, with trembling heart, I venture to the RSS feeds and hurl myself into the backwash and slime of the interwebs. First to my friends and aquaintances, then a division of labour between Irish and international bloggers, pundits, opinion gatherers and givers, novelists, artists, gobshites, the odd webcomic and finally a smattering of tech news to pretend I’m actually working. I spend the rest of my online day gurgling and choking on the deluge of yammering, hollering and mental gunk that has accreted in the feeding tubes as I slept. After my morning trawl, there is a longer session in the evening, filtering through the various bits and bobs, ephemera and exotica of the web.

That is not the reading I want to talk about. I want to talk about Reading. Not the place or the festival, but the Reading.

I am a reader at heart. But in the dark places of my readers soul I nurse a terrible secret. I am, you see, a very bad reader. I have passed my reading life paddling in the shallows, in the glorious world of the literary waterslide and the fictional big dipper. I have not paid my dues. I have not toiled in the fields of the giants, ploughing my lonely furrow across the nights plutonian shore. I have not read enough. I have not read properly. I have squandered my youth plucking the juiciest fruits from the lowest branches. I have not grasped the thorny briar of true literature. To be sure, I have tackled the odd classic or two, the slimmer volumes on the whole, or the minor works. Yet my shelves groan under mighty tomes of literature, languishing unread, year after year.

This year I intend to go some way to correct that balance. This year, I intend to Read.

To wit, I am starting a new project on the site. In addition to the Flickr Fiction and the occasional foul mouthed rant I have devised a project to keep me away from the tv and the internet and attempt to engage with a little more reading. As always the goal is to prod me into a little more writing too.

I am giving over the following reading year to The Classics, twenty six of them to be exact. I love to read, and when I find the time and manage to extinguish the deadly drone of the tv or the web and get down to some serious reading I average a fair pace. I have friends and aquaintances who plough through brick sized books with ease. I’m not like that, but I envy their ability.

Last year I read forty five books, a good year for me. Some for entertainment, some for research, some for the hell of it. Among them were a few ‘classics’, the kind of book you are ’supposed’ to have read. In some instances, when the classic is Sherlock Holmes or The Three Musketeers, then one is in for a treat. But what if it’s Middlemarch or Tristham Shandy? Those two books and their brethren leer at me from the depths of my bookshelves each day, taunting me. I’m hoping for this experiment to be a cathartic, purging, process.

This is my attempt to right the balance. To make a course correction to my reading life. It is also a genuine experiment. If these mighty tomes truly be the pinnacle of written expression in the novel form, then it will have been a worthy exercise and of personal benefit. If not, then the scales will fall from my eyes and I will lap up everything Dan Brown has to offer without a grumble.

I will chart my progress here on the blog. Week in week out. One book every two weeks. Twenty Six books in the year. Some weeks I’ll be ahead, others behind and, if I’m lucky, it will even out in the end.

On to the material. I have culled my list from from various half formed whimsies, vaguely authoritative texts, and the subtle canvassing and drunken interrogation, of patient and accomodating friends. Twenty six books is not a lot and I want to cover as much ground as possible. The books below represent a good chunk of the novels I have always wanted to read but, for one reason or another, have never gotten around to.

Frankly, some of the books on this list terrify the life out of me. My previous experience of such authors as George Eliot being interminable school lessons on Silas Marner, on the other hand, Don Quixote represents a mighty challenge in the sheer volume of its verbiage, let alone the strain on my weak lady wrists.

The rules:

• It must be a novel. No plays, poetry or short story collections allowed.
• It must be considered a classic. A good rule of thumb being I can pick it up easily in the classics section of the library or bookshop.
• Only one book per author allowed on the list.
• I must give at least one review of each book.

The Twenty-Six Books

(in no particular order)
Don Quixote , Miguel Cervantes
Ulysses , James Joyce
Great Expectations , Charles Dickens
Wuthering Heights , Emily Brontë
Moby Dick , Herman Melville
Return of The Native , Thomas Hardy
The Portrait of a Lady , Henry James
Sons and Lovers , D.H. Lawrence
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Madame Bovary , Gustave Flaubert
In Search of Lost Time Vol. I , Marcel Proust
The Sound and the Fury , William Faulkner
Tristham Shandy , Laurence Sterne
Vanity Fair , William Makepeace Thackeray
War and Peace , Leo Tolstoy
The Warden , Anthony Trollope
The Picture of Dorian Gray , Oscar Wilde
Germinal , Emile Zola
Jane Eyre , Charlotte Brontë
Pride and Prejudice , Jane Austen
North and South , Elizabeth Gaskell
The Secret Agent , Joseph Conrad
The Red Badge of Courage , Stephen Crane
Middlemarch , George Eliot
Robinson Crusoe , Daniel Defoe
Howards End , E.M. Forster

I intended to begin documenting this challenge at the beginning of January. However circumstances and cowardice prevented me, therefore I shall be posting catchup reviews over the next few days to bring progress up to speed. As always your thoughts, comments and reflections are most welcome.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 23rd, 2007 at 10:32 pm and is filed under Twenty-Six Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.