"A little while ago a friend mentioned to me that he had calculated how many books it was likely that he was going to be able to read during the rest of his life. He had calculated, given his current reading patterns, that he had the capacity to read another 800 books. However, having established this finite figure it had now become more of a burden than a guide. How could he justify picking up a trashy novel at an airport when there were thousands of great works still to be read. For every Harry Potter, a Tolstoy falls by the wayside."
Based on my poor current reading patterns, my age and likely death-date, I have another 552 books to read in my lifetime.
Gulp.
Here are four books I want to include in that 552 total, from The Economist's books of 2004:
FICTION
The Lambs of London. By Peter Ackroyd.
"A novel of intrigue set around a small bookshop in Holborn Passage in 19th-century London and the discovery of a document in Shakespeare’s own writing. The Lambs are a young brother and a sister taken into the confidence of a 17-year-old antiquarian. As clever and vivid as any work of Mr Ackroyd, a man deeply at home in the London of the past."
Cloud Atlas. By David Mitchell.
"In this feat of brilliant pyrotechnics, six interlocking stories mix the voices, among others, of a journalist in Governor Ronald Reagan’s California and a voyager crossing the Pacific in the mid-19th century."
Snow. By Orhan Pamuk.
"A novel about the tensions between Turkey’s urban, secularist elite and their long-derided Islamist opponents. By the leading interpreter of Turkish society to the western world, it deals with such familiar Pamuk themes as faith, identity and betrayal."
NON-FICTION
In Tasmania. By Nicholas Shakespeare.
"For many people, Tasmania is an island of the imagination, distant and alluring. Nicholas Shakespeare weaves a cast of unlikely characters into 200 years of Tasmanian history."
And from the New York Times' books of 2004, I'm looking forward to:
FICTION
Four Souls. By Louise Erdrich.
"A vengeful, partly comical plot that ranges about in time and space, rising in pitch to conclude in gorgeous incantations and poetry."
NON-FICTION
Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age. By Kevin Boyle.
"An account of the murder trial and eventual acquittal in 1925 Detroit of a black doctor who fired on a mob that had come to drive him from the house he bought in a white neighborhood."
I still haven't completed my own personal list of books to read this year. Bearing in mind how few books I have left to read in my lifetime, I could never conduct this no-reading experiment. Up until this year I used to get through around 5 (non-work related) books a month. So another of my new year's resolutions for 2005 is to read more and at least double my lifetime total.
Are you with me on this?
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