2014 has started off well for me, with a trip to Hadrian's Wall in Northumbria. Esther and I were there for 5 days and spent them mooching around the local countryside, visiting Vindolanda and Housesteads Roman forts, taking long windy walks along the wall itself and pootling to Hexham. All made possible because of our trusty car, and the fact that we can both now drive it. Two years ago neither of us could, and holidays to the wilds of the countryside in winter were an impossibility. Even if you could get to your accommodation - difficult - there was no chance of getting around on minimal winter bus timetables. We also took advantage of our limitless luggage allowance and spent most of our Christmas money in Cogito Books in Hexham, which is well worth a visit if you are in the area. I picked up copies of Longbourn by Jo Baker, Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig, The Dig by Cynan Jones and Butterflies in November by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir.
Now we are back to York and the real world, and my thoughts have turned back to the year ahead and my resolutions. I have one, in three parts, about reading and blogging and its extremely simple.
Take a more active part in the bookish world.
I have been thinking about this quite a lot. Over the last two years or so I have dropped away from book blogging, from keeping up with new releases and prizes and from chatting about my reading more generally. I desperately want to rectify that in 2014. I have two strategies for this.
- Average at least one blog post a week, and make them book reviews where I can. That should make 52 posts in the year - of which this is the first - and more than I have blogged in quite some time. I'm telling myself that quality and length doesn't matter; I'm just aiming for some coherent book thoughts and the rest depends on my inclination that week. A 3000 word epic or a 100 word mini post. Just something.
- Read and comment more widely in the blogosphere. This is really important, because the whole point of blogging for me is the conversation and the community. I'm going to be discovering as many new book blogs as I can.
- Stay current. I've read a lot of posts by bloggers who want to get away from the 'new books' rat race, and I've felt that way myself, but I've gone too far the other way. I read hardly any new releases in 2013 and missed the excitement and anticipation of them. So at the time of year when lots of bloggers are resolutely staring down their TBR I'm eagerly flicking through publisher's catalogues and planning what to buy, borrow and read. I've chosen at least one new book each month to read. Below is my list at the moment; consider these my most hotly anticipated reads of 2014 (so far).
- January
The Dig by Cynan Jones (Granta)
This short novels is literally plastered in blurbs from writers who admired it, and John Self has just posted his review of it here. It sounds like a brutal, bleak and cruel book, short and remorseless.
Built of the interlocking fates of a badger-baiter and a farmer struggling through lambing season, the story unfolds in a stark rural setting where man, animal, and land are at loggerheads. Jones writes of isolation and loss with resonant carefulness, and about the simple rawness of animal existence with an unblinking eye. There is no bucolic pastoral here. This is pure, pared-down rural realism, crackling with compressed energy, from a writer of uncommon gifts.
Also on my most anticipated list this month is The Night Guest by Fiona McFarlane (Sceptre), about a woman who might actually be a tiger (!) and The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara (Atlantic), about a 1950s doctor who finds the secret to long life on a Micronesian Island.
- February
Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi (Picador)
I *still* haven't read any Oyeyemi despite having every single one of her books on my TBR. Her new book is about the friendship between three unlikely women - Boy, Snow and Bird - and sounds intriguing. I'm looking to get a group discussion of this one going with some other Oyeyemi newbies as well as confirmed fans. If you'd like to take part, please do!
BOY Novak turns twenty and decides to try for a brand-new life. Flax Hill, Massachusetts, isn’t exactly a welcoming town, but it does have the virtue of being the last stop on the bus route she took from New York. Flax Hill is also the hometown of Arturo Whitman – craftsman, widower, and father of Snow.
SNOW is mild-mannered, radiant and deeply cherished – exactly the sort of little girl Boy never was, and Boy is utterly beguiled by her. If Snow displays a certain inscrutability at times, that’s simply a characteristic she shares with her father, harmless until Boy gives birth to Snow’s sister, Bird.
When BIRD is born Boy is forced to re-evaluate the image Arturo’s family have presented to her, and Boy, Snow and Bird are broken apart.
Sparkling with wit and vibrancy, Boy, Snow, Bird is a deeply moving novel about three women and the strange connection between them.
- See more at: http://www.picador.com/books/boy,-snow,-bird#sthash.ZfscLAL7.dpufBOY Novak turns twenty and decides to try for a brand-new life. Flax Hill, Massachusetts, isn’t exactly a welcoming town, but it does have the virtue of being the last stop on the bus route she took from New York. Flax Hill is also the hometown of Arturo Whitman – craftsman, widower, and father of Snow.
SNOW is mild-mannered, radiant and deeply cherished – exactly the sort of little girl Boy never was, and Boy is utterly beguiled by her. If Snow displays a certain inscrutability at times, that’s simply a characteristic she shares with her father, harmless until Boy gives birth to Snow’s sister, Bird.
When BIRD is born Boy is forced to re-evaluate the image Arturo’s family have presented to her, and Boy, Snow and Bird are broken apart.
Sparkling with wit and vibrancy, Boy, Snow, Bird is a deeply moving novel about three women and the strange connection between them.
- See more at: http://www.picador.com/books/boy,-snow,-bird#sthash.ZfscLAL7.dpufBOY Novak turns twenty and decides to try for a brand-new life. Flax Hill, Massachusetts, isn’t exactly a welcoming town, but it does have the virtue of being the last stop on the bus route she took from New York. Flax Hill is also the hometown of Arturo Whitman – craftsman, widower, and father of Snow.
SNOW is mild-mannered, radiant and deeply cherished – exactly the sort of little girl Boy never was, and Boy is utterly beguiled by her. If Snow displays a certain inscrutability at times, that’s simply a characteristic she shares with her father, harmless until Boy gives birth to Snow’s sister, Bird.
When BIRD is born Boy is forced to re-evaluate the image Arturo’s family have presented to her, and Boy, Snow and Bird are broken apart.
Sparkling with wit and vibrancy, Boy, Snow, Bird is a deeply moving novel about three women and the strange connection between them.
- See more at: http://www.picador.com/books/boy,-snow,-bird#sthash.ZfscLAL7.dpuf- March
The Hunting School by Sarah Hall (Faber)
I'm actually not sure if this book is coming out this month. Amazon has it as March 2014; Book Depository as February 2015, and Faber doesn't have it all. Since they are the publisher and should know best I guess it hasn't been scheduled yet. But I'm putting it on here just in case, because a new book by Sarah Hall is a thing to be eagerly awaited.
Also catching my eye, and definitely out in March is Northanger Abbey by Val McDermid (The Borough Press), the crime writer's contribution to the Austen Project, and The Dynamite Room by Jason Hewitt (Simon & Schuster). I have a proof of this (kindly sent by the publisher) and the blurb has hooked me in. A young girl walks through a deserted Suffolk village in July 1940 to find that her family and all her neighbours have disappeared. Late at night a German soldier comes and takes her hostage in her own home, heralding a full blown invasion. He knows her name, promises not to hurt her, and is somehow familiar...
- April
Bodies of Light by Sarah Moss (Granta)
Last year I read two books by Sarah Moss, including Night Waking a sort-of compaion to this book. It is the first of two, and is full blown historical fiction. Right up my street I think, and a beautiful cover.
Ally (older sister of May in Night Waking), is intelligent, studious and engaged in an eternal - and losing - battle to gain her mother's approval and affection. Her mother, Elizabeth, is a religious zealot, keener on feeding the poor and saving prostitutes than on embracing the challenges of motherhood. Even when Ally wins a scholarship and is accepted as one of the first female students to read medicine in London, it still doesn't seem good enough.
This was a hard month to choose for. I'm also tooking forward to Look Who's Back by Timur Vermes (Maclehose Press) about Hitler making a comeback on YouTube and The Quick by Lauren Owens (Jonathan Cape), which seems to be a rompy Victorian pastiche with twins.
- May
Gwendolen by Diana Souhami (Quercus)
I read George Eliot's Daniel Deronda a couple of years ago, and the character who has stayed with me - far better than Daniel himself or his sappy love interest - is Gwendolen Harleth. This book picks up her life 30 years on, as she writes her confessional.
Gambling at the roulette tables of the Kursaal, Gwendolen Harleth glances up to meet Daniel Deronda’s arresting stare. Striking, selfish and wilful, she is at that moment the mistress of her destiny. Thirty years on, the flawed heroine and true protagonist of Eliot’s last great novel writes her confessional to the man whose ever-imagined gaze has prevailed throughout her life. The egotism, naiveté and sensitivity of her blazing youth is evoked with bittersweet wisdom; a passionate remembrance of the events leading up to the marriage that broke her spirit, and the loss of the man who broke her heart.
- June
I actually don't have a book for June yet, so I'll pick another May Book, Cuckoo Song by Frances Hardinge (Pan Macmillan Childrens). I'm really looking forward to reading more of her in 2014, after her A Face Like Glass made my top 13 of 2013.
When Triss wakes up after an accident, she knows that something is very wrong. She is insatiably hungry; her sister seems scared of her and her parents whisper behind closed doors. She looks through her diary to try to remember, but the pages have been ripped out.
Soon Triss discovers that what happened to her is more strange and terrible than she could ever have imagined, and that she is quite literally not herself. In a quest find the truth she must travel into the terrifying Underbelly of the city to meet a twisted architect who has dark designs on her family - before it's too late . . .
The second half of 2014 already looks set to be rich in new releases, with The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters (Virago), Lila by Marilynne Robinson (Virago), The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber (Canongate) and a new, as yet untitled book by Ali Smith due between September and November.
So, which new books are you looking forward to in 2014?
~~Victoria~~