From now on, I'll read what I want

Last entry I made humble reference to a minor goal I had last year of reading eighty books. As I said such a lofty goal I did not end up achieving falling six short of the intended. Satisfaction you think might still would be had at getting so close, pride that I even got half-way through, though it is perplexity mostly that overwhelms tinged with the slight uselessness of regret.

This is explained by the simple fact that the goal itself  predisposed a decision upon reading as-much-as-possible-as-quick-as-can-be, rather than what-you- want-to-at-your-own-pace, a side-effect of this being that I read a lot of smaller, no I'll not shy away from the fact, books in a great succession than take the time pouring over great works, great signifying both depth of content and width of pages here.

Indeed this fact did occur to me somewhere very soon along the project and saw me pick up The Brother Karamazov part way through against the very notion of such a pose, coming with it a welcome respite from all the frivolous pointless ditty of a thing works I can gobbled down in the first part of the year.

The reason I kept reading. A certain favourite out of the favourites

 Do I regret it entirely as a project? Never, as in between the wastes of time was squeezed gems that I might have put off reading if such a stamina and thirst for novelistic digestion had not been lit in my gut.

Will I do it again? Not likely, or at least, not in such a vast form, the idea of 80 essays or short-stories or poems, maybe even if I feel ambitious one a day, yes, but novels, these things were made for time.

Which brings forth the obvious and pertinent question here, one put to me often through the year by sceptics and admirers a like, do I remember them all? A small yes and a small no.

Can I go through all of them and give you a sentence explanation detailing their content, author, why I read them and what I thought of it: of course.

Can I give you vast plot details: simply, no. But this diminishes from the experience little, as I challenge anyone to remember in complex detail the many minor character traits, literary flourishes and plot digressions of even their favorite work. These things are left for school reports on books we're forced to read, and still more so are retained in the memory only as long as the exam date requires we need to be able to recall such on demand.

Would I recommend the adventure to others: Yes, for the fact that I believe most people to under-estimate the fair chuck of the literary catalog they can get through in a year if only they set their mind to it, and also for the learning experience it offers by acutely and successfully diagnosing what it is you gain from reading, and therefore leading you to pinpoint what you ought to read. When such vast quantities of anything are consumed one is able to tell very quickly what works for them and what sadly pails.

For myself I could not articulate precisely what such is, though I recognise it when I'm reading it and when it's lacking. The standards: quality of expression, ingenuity in storytelling, class, style, insight, depth, thought, a delight and sorrow that refracts and reflects back upon myself and the world as I read further. Moments when I must place the work open facing down upon my lap and but sigh with eyes closed as I breath through the pull of authors literary genius. Not all of you will seek such from what you read, but you at least ought to know that you don't.

Enough of the general sense, let us get down to particulars; whatever the hell did I end up reading and when?! I won't bore you with a line-by-line description of each work as I professed I could do above, instead I'll offer a few general insights and leading categories to summarise them as a body:

o   Interesting fact number one: though I did intend to swap between male and female authors consecutively all my way up to eight and naught, only twenty-eight of the books were the mind's concoction of the more squishy of sexes

o   Again, against my initial intensions, a mere seven of them were works of non-fiction, with less than half of that falling absolutely into the category of  hard philosophy

o   The split of works written this century and the second half of the last to the rest of history was 32/42, quite reasonable considering my oft sighted classics addiction, and by no small means a result of great restraint exercised on my behalf

o   Of absolute, without a doubt-stop that damn phone-'cause it's ringing off the hook-classics I count nine, though I won't be detailing the choices that lead me to such a number, have some fun yourself with the complete list

o   The most works I read by one author was three by le Carré, purely because I read The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, loved it and made by way through his two best from the Smiley vs. Karla Trilogy, those being nowhere near as good

o   Of Woolf, Hemmingway, Le Guin and Bataille I read two each, each for various different reasons though similar in that it was unintentional and was enjoyable/worthwhile in varying degrees

But now to the actual list, below I have composed a colour-coded key for your reading convenience:

o   Authors I read for the first time and that were an absolute revelation and of whom I intend to read more of soon

o   Authors I returned to who didn't by any means disappoint

o   Books I greatly anticipated, and had for a while, that lagged

o   The weirdest things I read, odd things I picked up or was given or stumbled upon, some of which were fabulous and some not very, all none the less making for a bizarre reading experience

o   Strongly recommended

o   Favourites

o   You can assume they didn’t provoke a strong enough reaction in me either one way or the other; wouldn’t suggest avoidance though there’s not a lot of point either

January

1. Home - Marilynne Robinson

2. Rage - Richard Bachman (pseudonym of Stephen King)

3. The Circling Song - Nawal El Saadawi

Best start I could have made
to the reading year

4. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

5. Mrs Dalloway's Party - Virgina Woolf

6. Thrist for Love - Yukio Mishima

7. My Brillant Career - Miles Franklin

8. The Quiet American - Graham Greene

9. Sita - Kate Millett

10. The Leopard - Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

11. Lois the Witch - Elizabeth Gaskell

12. Death in Venice - Thomas Mann

13. The Woman Destroyed - Simone de Beauvoir

14. The Quantity Theory of Insanity - Will Self

15. The Vagina Monologues - Eve Ensler

16. Heart of Darkness - Joesph Conrad

17. Demian - Herman Hesse

18. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold - John le Carré

19. Nadja - André Breton

20. Tinker Tailor Solider Spy - John le Carré

21. The Color Purple - Alice Walker

February

22. Friday, or, The Other Island - Michel Tournier

23. The Last Man - Mary Shelley

24. In Cold Blood - Truman Capote

25. A History of Violence - John Wagner, illustrated by Vince Locke

26. The Bonfire of Vanities - Tom Wolfe

27. The Problems of Philosophy - Bertrand Russell

28. A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

29. On Liberty - John Stuart Mill

March

30. Written on the Body - Jeanette Winterson

31. Belief, Truth and Knowledge - David Armstrong

32. Breathing Lessons - Anne Tyler

33. A Sense of Reality - Graham Greene

34. A Very Long Way from Anywhere Else - Ursula Le Guin

35. Hypatia - Charles Kingsley

36. The Dispossesed - Ursula Le Guin

37. Sartre: A collection of critical essays – edt. Edith Kern

38. The Fuck-Up - Arthur Nersesian

A present that was truly a gift to read

May

39. Serve It Forth - M. F. K. Fisher

40. What is History? - E. H. Carr

41. 'Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters' & 'Seymour: An Introduction': J. D. Salinger

42. L'Abbe C - Georges Bataille

43. Bliss and Other Stories - Katherine Mansfield

44. Giovanni's Room - James Baldwin

45. Smiley's People - John le Carré

46. So Bright and Delicate: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne - John Keats

47. The Oasis - Mary McCarthy

June

48. The Dice Man - Luke Rhinehart (George Cockcroft)

49. Story of the Eye - Georges Bataille

July

50. Story of O - Pauline Réage

51. The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway

August

52. Shades of Grey - Jasper Fforde

53. Zen and the Art of Motocycle Maintenance - Robert M. Pirsig

54. The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

September

Longingly anticipated and to be well
loved for a while yet

55. A Visit from the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan

56. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

57. The Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury

October

58. In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje

59. Ham on Rye - Charles Bukowski

60. The Hours - Michael Cunningham

61. Moderato Cantabile - Marguerite Duras

62. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

63. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

64. The Martian Way - Isaac Asimov

November

65. Room - Emma Donoghue

66. The Loved One - Evelyn Waugh

67. The Philosophers Dog: Friendship with Animals - Raimond Gita

68. Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut

69. Jasper Jones - Craig Silvey

70. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

December

71. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

72. The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

73. Mrs Dalloway - Virgina Woolf

74. The Torrents of Spring - Ernest Hemingway

I would to like to end off by offering forth an odd suggestions of six books I could have read instead of the seventy-four that I did and would, as I so arrogantly and conceitedly assume, have been more satisfied spending all year reading***:

o   Daniel Deronda - George Eliot

o   The Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri

o   Living My Life, Volumes 1 & 2 - Emma Goldman

o   Ulysses - James Joyce

o   Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

o   The Book of The City of Ladies - Christine de Pizan

* Mr J.D. being a rare exception as I did not have high expectations for I had not previously enjoy his work greatly on earlier readings

*** Hermann another exception, as opposite to Salinger, I had much enjoyed his work previously and found this one to be underwhelming, which does intrigue me to re-read Steppenwolf and find out if it retains the glory I once bestowed on it in younger years. I don't hesitate to believe that Journey to the East would still stand up though

*** Of course remembering that the insight that has allowed me to collate this list could have only been gained by going through what I did last year

A goodbye to posturing

Though technically enrolled at University last year, taking full advantage of the concession travel discounts and abundant free library facilities such posturing provides, I did not attend classes outside of the initial few weeks of first Semester and don't believe I handed anything in by the way of meaningful work, though there might very have been a metaphysics tutorial paper sat and a brief if also horribly wrong digression on 4-dimensional space-worms which I understood little of at the time and know to be utter nonsense now.

Knowing in all likelihood that I would be back, as I am now, in full academic swing the following year, I thought it wise to take specific means to set myself activities in order to retain my sharpness of mind (to be clear I am no supposing my mind to be that of a saber or samurai sword here that might lose traces of existence by becoming the point of a needle, but more a hardy hammer not descending so far as to become a Neanderthal 's wooden club). Such sharpening can be loosely denoted under the three major intellectual forms: reading; writing; and talking. Such as what makes the greatness of these forms in their expanse and freedom is only as usual their weakness, and thus I was a little more precise in my guidelines. Reading was aimed at the humble total of 80* to be completed in the year, varying with style, period, subject and inevitably quality, though such variance in the last category is not ideally sort. Spoiler alert, I didn't make it, but more on that for another entry. I'll skip to talking and be brief, as it explains itself, and if we're not clear on that lets talk some time. 

Finally to writing, the motherload, the many tongued fire of beast and snow that snuggles next to you on gusty summers night and asks so gently if you'll be ever so accommodating and let her eat your head. Yeah, we get along. My attack on this beast was two-pronged: other people’s essays and poetry. I feel like I'm just going to let the first spike sit out there for now, let you get use to the way it does or does not ride up nicely into your ethical arse, I had my justificatory spiel at the time, which I will share in good time, though again, that's not my point today. That means poetry must be. [Please make room for those around you rushing out of the theatre of the pretentiousness and indecipherable allegory].

It was around the same time as I created this space right here that I first thought poetry might not be that flouncy feminine bean-flicking phenomena I always had made particular mind to avoid. As a classics-junky I was aquatinted with greats that I loved. In high school I went through the usual Plath-Hughes infatuation, first year saw me become a Manley-Hopkins enthusiast (made more or less comprehensible when taken with the fact that I had just recently lost my family faith had from childhood), and I think Sexton is brilliant. I had dabbled, attended dinner parties and mistakenly shared an explicit erotic exposé on ‘original sin’ full of Nazi allusions to boot around a table of young Christians, but outside the shock and performance of it all I found a lot wanting.

Till I found myself writing it. Till I was standing in the shower composing phrases and trying to steady my hand as it bounced along with the jilting bus trying to write on the way to my various works. Till I re-read over old things and saw I had been writing it for years but had been too lazy to hit enter and thus was left with descriptive emotional blocks of text rather than stylised stanzas of prose. And as with how these things go, suddenly it surrounded me, a co-worker ran the open-mike night at the pub down the road, the housemate had a boyfriend who entered spoken-word competitions the Uni held on a regular basis, a friend had won competitions, those based on performance and others written, and then I was informed of a brand-spanking-new poetry competition being held for unpublished Australian females over aged 18. Hitch was that it was for 30 poems and that there was three months to go. Luck was that my laptop hard drive died three weeks out of the submission date and with it the majority of the poems I had paced myself to write in preparation. Classically my desktop decided to give out too three days before deadline leaving me with no means of retyping what I'd lost or composing brand new. These things are expected though, Baudelaire was a drug addict and Milton went blind, so I'd say I got off relatively lightly.

Now as technically the competition guidelines stated that none of the works were to have been previously published, and I don't have the strength left to go into the debate between online vs. print publishing and the fight between them for superiorioty and credibility, I'm going to share two with you that I didn't end up including in the final cut. The first I thought I had lost with the laptops decline though had the neat advantage of stumbling upon in its original hard-physical-written copy only this morning under a collection of papers on my desk. The second was the first thing I wrote after I thought I'd lost everything, and though I did initially intend to submit it along as well, forgot about it and probably appropriately so, as it speaks largely of works gone to me, which though may be ideal to share in a space such as this is a little odd and sloppy to carry on about in a larger collection of different works.

Crumble

The cut of the cliff edge as it

touches the sky,

a places' emptiness thats never been filled,

expect perhaps the odd wander from

centuries to days ago,

unassuming they make a way

though the gentle torrent of waters clear

that flow quickly beneath languid ferns

tea stained sandstone escarpments of rock

that hang around us as a shelter.

These cliffs will fall, he says,

one day,

and getting through these parts will be much

more difficult.

It's already hard whisper the scratches on

my legs; I have to learn to live with the

feeling of flies on my skin.

I have to try and be here all the time,

though even to be here now, in such a place

whilst in this place, I can't.

I dread the night steady in its approach,

to lie in the darkness and wait for a

rest that will not come, for the ability

to fall asleep on my own is lost,

I must trick myself into slumber through

boredom from overstimulation,

this idea of laying down and choosing

to sleep is a freedom unwanted. The shame.

These things and more fester and

consume the minutes I lay awake in this black.

A solid shadow of impenetrable silence,

as if a weight of rock has crumbled

and trapped me beneath it.

Lower Wollangambe, inspiration and location of conception for Crumble

Hard drive

They're gone now and most of them

didn't get the chance to live, as living as

a bunch of sounds, vowels and black

hovering punctuation can be, less so

now than ever when confined to an eternity

as pixels that waver on a

glowing screen. Fragments that corrupt

and implode neatly without show

in a rectangular box that decides,

without mind or reason,

to never illuminate again. The loss

is unsatisfactory, there’s no metaphorical

embers to scrape together and cradle

here, just the absence of a buzz and

the receipt from a man who told

you there's no hope. The life saver of man,

the thing to take him roaring into the

future has left this woman with half-

remembered phrases of expressions she

doesn't dare return back to the emotional

localities from which they initially

sprung; but she will. Like the traces of

old hair styles in hair they shape

memory: bed sheets blue to suit the mood;

a metaphorical analogy between the ecstasy

of the cunt and a midsummer bushfire; books

pressuring existence whilst another nestles

his head against a gutter; notions of totalising

Hegelian philosophy used to justify

infidelity; fortresses made of flesh and

bone; scatting phrases to defeat the weight

of intellectualism in an attempt to reinvigorate

the dying imagination whilst composing an

essay on Keats; sitting on a beach from

my mother’s youth; lover's and their

birthdays; a humorous rollick through the

debauchery of a contemporary music festival

as a way of distancing and yet coming to

terms with being just one more in the

crowd... Just silliness.

Things I should let lay forgotten, to instead

take up as I so oft rant about the chance of becoming

anew, and yet not, the loss I feel of these

words that not only were concretised manifestations

of my mind I could share and show off, but were

the very processes by which I could let carry on,

to discard through poetical distract, a means

of figuring out how to feel.

Gone entirely now, the experience, the feelings,

their conception and expression, perhaps this is

the ultimate release. Still I wait for the call

that might send them tumbling back.

* Truth be it, this number was by no means picked out the air, it was indeed the exact number of books read by a far superiorly intelligent female I acquainted late in the year previous as she so hurriedly informed me on our first date. I liked it, it sounded impressive initially, though when broken down to under seven a month, around one and a half a week and a general generous estimate of 200 pages a day, it sounded entirely reasonable to a girl unemployed and strongly considering flunking Uni that year.