I didn't make any reading resolutions for 2010, because they seemed less necessary than they had before, but the chronic biases that have emerged over the last 12 months need some curbing I think. No better time than New Year to set myself some goals of self-correction.
Resolution 1: To read more male writers
I feel ridiculous writing that, when the media, academics and reading community still sometimes privilege (even revere) male writers above their female counterparts. But, the truth is, that I have developed a semi-conscious prejudice the other way. Thinking carefully about it, I realise it runs deep. It isn't just that I'm more likely to choose to buy, borrow or read a book by a woman, I'm also more likely to read reviews of books by women, and pursue recommendations of female authors. I find my eyes glancing over new books by male writers and plumping instead with women's debuts; I pick up Classics by women before Classics by men. It's a false preference, definitely, because it's not as though experience has taught me that I like fiction by women better. It's simply that a reading habit that originated in a desire to correct a tendency the other way has swung far, far beyond its intended target. So in 2011 I'm going to try to correct my gender bias with a little directed reading. Not that I'm going to choose a list of books by men and plough determinedly through them, just that I'm going to be more aware of my literary diet.
I know what you're thinking: that I'm making a fuss about something silly, because surely the aim is that we don't have to think about an author's sex at all. It shouldn't be a conscious matter like this, and what does it matter if I don't read many books by men? Well, first, it matters to me because it means that I'm missing out on a whole world of books that are passing me by. Second, it matters to me because its symptomatic of an underlying bias in the way I see the world. I deplore this same kind of bias when it works the other way - when the Booker Prize longlist of 20 books only has 2 or 3 women writers on it, for example and nobody seems to notice, - and so it would be hypocritical of me to ignore it in myself. Thus, 'read more male writers' is my battle cry. Most particularly, I want to read more 20th century classics by men - I haven't read any Roth or Pynchon or Auster or Bellow or Faulkner - when I've read many of their female counterparts (thanks in no small part to the excellent work of Virago).
Resolution 2: To read more fiction in translation
I say this every year: my reading is too Anglo-centric. I read very little in translation, and not for want of exposure to it; again, it's a semi-conscious bias. I'm reaching for what I know, rather than for something new. That, and I'm inherently suspiscious of the art of translation. Am I really reading what the author intended? Is the writing better in the original? If I'm not reading the original words, where does the heart of the book lie? Anyway, I'm prescribing myself a shot of Why Translation Matters by Edith Grossman, followed by some draughts from the Dublin IMPAC Award, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the past winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature. I've started on this resolution already by embarking on Independent People by Halldor Laxness, translated from Icelandic by J. A. Thompson. Laxness won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955, and I bought this book on the strength of the jacket comments from Annie Proulx, Jane Smiley and Fay Weldon, all of whom praise it in ecstatic language. (Which, I realise, suggests that although Laxness was a man, I picked up the book because women authors I admire recommended it. Hmmmmm. Oh well, it still counts towards Resolution 1.)
Resolution 3: To read more from my TBR
This is a mantra repeated across the lit-blogosphere with startling regularity, meaning that I'm not the only one who buys books in a frenzy of enthusiasm and then lets them sit and fade on a shelf. It seems to me that there is a very short window of opportunity for many newly purchased or gifted books. It lasts about a month, while the lustre of novelty hangs over it. If I don't pick it up within that first month, then it's chances of being read rapidly decrease, until it becomes a fixture on the shelf and I feel as though I have read it even though I haven't. It doesn't happen so much with Classics, because their appeal is not in their newness but in their timelessness; and it doesn't happen so much with non-fiction, perhaps because I choose those books more discerningly based on quite fixed interests (history, literature, nature). But it happens all the time with recently published fiction. I think because part of the attraction of a new book is its recent birth, its freshness, and the debate and dialogue surrounding it in review pages and online. Six months down the line, the book that had me breaking down the door at Waterstones has been replaced in my flighty heart by another. This is no doubt also why the vast majority of books I read in 2010 were published in 2010, or at least in 2009.
I want to try and mitigate this tendency. (Though not eradicate it completely; I'm not going to plot my own failure by declaring a book-buying moratorium - I don't have the will power. I know I don't, because I just took 5 minutes out of the composition of this very post to pop over to Amazon and buy a copy of Winifred Holtby's South Riding, because there is a new TV adaptation of it in the new year, and because several other bloggers seem to be reading and enjoying it.) I'm going to try and make every other book I pick up a book from my TBR pile, and preferably from quite far down at the bottom of said TBR.
I was going to make a fourth resolution, but no, I think three is probably enough. The fourth will save for next year. What do I think of my chances of success? I think I can conquer resolution 1, if only by pursuing resolution 2. I note, for example, that the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize has never been won by a woman in its 20 year history. Never. If I were just to read the winners of the last decade I would more than double the number of male authors I read in a year. Oh the irony of my taking advantage of one prejudice to recitify my own! (Is it that more male authors are being translated? Or just that they're being read? The longlists for the prize would suggest the former.) And resolution 3 will contribute towards resolution 1 too, because (anecdotely) I seem more likely to read the books I buy by women than the ones I buy by men. This interconnectedness of my goals should mean that I can fulfill them all. We shall see.
What are your reading resolutions?
~~Victoria~~
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