My reading plans for 2023

New beginnings

My reading plan, by Terry Freedman

This is my submission for the upcoming Soaring Twenties Social Club Symposium issue. The theme is “Beginnings”.

This article has the potential of being very short, for one simple reason. I don’t have much of a reading plan, and I don’t do new year resolutions.

Well, that’s it. Thanks for reading, I hope — what? You want a fuller explanation? OK, here goes.

Taking the second one first, I don’t do new year resolutions because I believe that each day should be a cause for celebration and renewal. After all, you’ve woken up, and you have not, unlike the lady in the blues song I Don’t Know, woken up and found your own self dead.

Thus each morning I start with writing some fiction, aka my to do list, and then get on with my day.

As for the reading list, I like serendipity. Last week I read somewhere that someone had a reading plan. They were going to read one book a week for the whole year, getting through the classics like Heart of Darkness, Frankenstein and so on. One week each. Then next year another load of classics. Then the following year etc etc ad infinitum. All very worthy, and certainly a plan: I’ve had several classics on my to-be-read list for years — in some cases decades — so this would seem like a good way of clearing the backlog.

Except, except.

It all seems relentless, cold-blooded, unintuitive, and completely alien to the way I read, which is as follows.

First, refer to the picture at the top of this article. Each rectangle represents a book. So, I start reading Book 1, and there’s a reference, perhaps in a footnote, to a different book. I go scooting off to that one, where I come across, perhaps in a footnote — well, you get the picture. The scooting is represented by arrows, although I suspect you’ve worked that out.

Second, and partly as a result of the first point and partly as a result of my preference changes, I usually find myself reading several books at the same time. At the moment, for example, I’m reading a book on diplomacy and leadership, one on dictator literature (which, thinking about it, has a message the polar opposite of the diplomacy book), one on meadows and one on writers’ journeys. I also alternate whole book reading with short stories and essays.

Short stories. Now here’s a good example of how I read. A few weeks ago I borrowed a book from the library called The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories. I brought it home, where it lay undisturbed until I was told that I was being sent a copy of an Italo Calvino book of essays. I looked in the short stories book, where I found a short story by Calvino and an even shorter bio. I read those, as a kind of warm up in preparation for the essays, but in the table of contents I noticed that there was a story by Primo Levy too. Must read that, I thought, but while I was on my way to it another story by someone I’d never heard of caught my eye. And besides, I remembered that I have a book by Levy called Other People’s Trades….

I do have a few books etc I know I will be reading, because they are the required reading for a few courses I’ve booked myself on. But on the whole, my reading is eclectic, flexible, fluid and exactly right for the frame of mind I happen to be in at the time.

Good luck to people who regard their reading as a project they have to achieve at a breakneck pace. I had enough of that sort of thing when I worked for a local authority. We had these plans handed down from on high which assumed that nobody was ever going to be ill. Considering everyone in England has a permanent cold (ok, I have a permanent cold, and I like to think of myself as a representative sample) that is simply living in a fantasy world. No, I’m sticking with my own approach, which is pretty much what it’s always been, which means that my new beginning is the same as it’s always been, and so not new at all.

What are your thoughts on all this? Do you think I’m not a serious reader? Then go on, despise me.