Nicholas Laughlin's Life List

Nicholas Laughlin's Life List
An experiment in biblio-biography

Thursday, March 31, 2005

Nearly two years later....

These days I seem to read magazines mostly. I subscribe to far too many of them. I've also become the kind of person who starts books & doesn't finish them, through sheer distraction. There is a more or less stable pile of half- or quarter-read books on my bedside table. I refuse to reshelve them because any day now I'm due to take them up again. Then every few months or so the bedside table tips over & its load of books joins the larger, less orderly pile on the floor. (Cue recollection of John Updike's essay "The Unread Book Route".) I also seem to have less time available for reading (where did it go?)--at least, that's what I'm forced to think when I rack my memory to make a list of what I've read over the last two years & see how alarmingly short it is. (Cue recollection of Virginia Woolf's essay "Hours in a Library", with its wistful thinking back to a youthful time when "one can have done nothing but read".)

I began this "experiment in biblio-biography" in April 2003, & didn't manage to keep it going for even a fortnight. Here's a second attempt at charting the evolving self through an ongoing reading list, starting with a patchy summary of what I've been ingesting since my last entry, a year & eleven months ago.

2005 thus far

- started the year with what may become my traditional re-reading of Howards End
- Dart, by Alice Oswald
- lots of John Berryman
- Unrecounted, by W.G. Sebald
- Robert Antoni's new novel, Carnival (a re-reading of Divina Trace is tentatively scheduled for later this year)
- in preparation for a trip to Guyana, I read Pauline Melville's Shape-Shifter & about half of The Migration of Ghosts
- re-read Andrew Salkey's Georgetown Journal for the same reason
- on my return from Guyana, went on a Guyana-reading blitz--dipping into & out of various books on history, politics, society, Cheddi Jagan's West on Trial, A.J. Seymour's poems, Denis Williams's Prehistoric Guyana, Evelyn Waugh's Ninety-two Days, the chapter on Guyana in Naipaul's Middle Passage (the bit that sticks in my head is his complaint about the impossibility of finding decent coffee in Georgetown), etc.
- am currently reading three books by turns: Pauline Melville's Ventriloquist's Tale, Iris Murdoch's Sovereignty of Good, & W.G. Sebald's Campo Santo

2004

- I started the year by re-reading all of Forster's novels, Howards End first, then, probably in this order, Where Angels Fear to Tread, A Room with a View, The Longest Journey, A Passage to India, & Maurice
- this seemed to lead naturally to Tom Stoppard's play The Invention of Love
- Ian McDonald's Between Silence and Silence
- Salman Rushdie's Step Across this Line
- read E.M. Cioran's Anathemas and Admirations & re-read Walcott's Another Life in St Lucia
- re-read The Years in Jamaica
- Falling Slowly, by Anita Brookner
- Angela Carter's Wise Children (wondered why I hadn't read her before)
- Nobrow, by Jonathan Seabrook, most of the contents of which I'd previously read in the New Yorker
- three of the books in the Oxford/NYPL Seven Deadly Sins series--Simon Blackburn's Lust, Francine Prose's Gluttony, & Joseph Epstein's Envy
- on a short trip to Tobago I re-read Dave Eggers's Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius because there happened to be a paperback copy in the house I was staying in. I seem to remember finishing it on the plane on the way back, which means I actually stole it
- at some point I picked up Fortress of Solitude again & finished it
- my friend Jan Woolman's Expecting Good Things of All, a history of the Blake School in Minneapolis
- The Line of Beauty, by Alan Hollinghurst
- The Biographer's Tale, by A.S. Byatt
- started Kafka's Amerika but got barely twenty pages in
- James Christopher Aboud's new Lagahoo Poems
- re-read Vahni Capildeo's No Traveller Returns
- the last three months of the year I read & re-read poetry more than anything else--in intense bursts: Heaney, Hughes, Walcott, Yeats, Muldoon, Stevens, Pound, Marianne Moore, cummings, Randall Jarrell (also his letters), Roethke, Swinburne, Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, Graves, Keats (also his letters), Anne Carson, Jorie Graham, Spencer Short, Wislawa Szymborska, Brodsky, Emily Dickinson, Frank O'Hara, A.R. Ammons, Keith Douglas, May Swenson, Richard Wilbur, Auden, Basil Bunting, Rilke's Duino Elegies, Christopher Smart....

Late April to December 2003

- Tropisms, by Nathalie Sarraute
- my friend Vahni Capildeo's first book of poems, No Traveller Returns
- Timothy Donnelly's Twenty-seven Props for a Production of "Eine Lebenszeit"
- Sidney Smith's letters, in the old Oxford World's Classics paperback edition; this was my Underground reading for a week on a trip to London
- Keats's letters
- Speaking of Beauty, by Denis Donoghue
- Invisible Forms, by Kevin Jackson
- Joe Orton's diaries
- Literary Occasions, by V.S. Naipaul, most of the contents of which I'd previously read in earlier books
- Errol Hill's Trinidad Carnival, which I must have read years ago at school
- Paris Trance, by Geoff Dyer
- Flaubert's Parrot, by Julian Barnes
- Halls of Fame, by John D'Agata
- Timoleon Vieta Come Home, by Dan Rhodes
- Politics, by Adam Thirlwell
- The Calligrapher, by Edward Docx
- Stephen Spender's journals
- much of Paul Auster's Art of Hunger
- tried very hard to read Wilson Harris's latest novel, The Mask of the Beggar, but as usual found him impossible
- much of Paul Muldoon, in a few sittings
- The Last Samurai, by Helen DeWitt
- half of Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude
- the little Hesperus edition of E.M. Forster's unfinished novel Arctic Summer, right at the end of the year

posted by Nicholas Laughlin | 1:47 PM