Books

New Year’s reading resolutions

 Jane Ciabattari

• Books
• Literature

• 

  Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

  Proust’s seven-volume masterpiece, published between 1913 and 1927, is often on quite a few "Books I promise to read this year” lists. It tops my round-up of classic books andauthors you really should explore in the coming year. Proust’s masterpiece is daunting, yes. But you owe it to yourself to read it. Nabokov lauded the gargantuan Proust work for “the transmutation of sensation into sentiment, the ebb tide of memory, waves of emotion such as desire, jealousy, and artistic euphoria.” The mesmerizing effect of Proust’s work can serve as a counterbalance to our internet-driven times. "An hour is not merely an hour," Proust wrote, "it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates." Be prepared to be influenced in unexpected ways. Novelist Jennifer Egan’s reading group began reading In Search of Lost Time the week of the 9/11attacks. The group took about seven years to complete it, by which time Proust had inspired Egan’s 2010 novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad (which won the Pulitzer and National Book Critics Circle awards). (The Modern Library Classics)

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  Beowulf, translated by JRR Tolkien

  In the epic poem Beowulf, a seagoing warrior king slays monstrous Grendel and his even more monstrous and vengeful mother. Fifty years later, he is defeated by a blazing 50-ft dragon. This is a good year to take on this cornerstone of Anglo-Saxon literature. The 1926 translation by legendary Beowulf scholar JRR Tolkien has just been published, along with his Oxford lectures and several invented texts, with Tolkien’s son Christopher as editor. Tolkien’s translation is faithful, clear and vivid. He describes Grendel’s attacks on the mead hall thus:“biting the bone-joints, drinking blood from veins, great gobbets gorging down.” In the elegiac last lines, he depicts Beowulf as “ever of the kings of earth of men most generous and to men most gracious, to his people most tender and for praise most eager.” Tolkien’s erudition and his passion for the work makes the translation dazzling. (Harper Collins)

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  Jane Austen, Emma

  Emma is Austen’s most complex, mature work, weaving together her signature comic touch and astute sense of human nature, the subtlety lauded by Virginia Woolf, who said of Austen "of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness", and in a deeper sense of what is at stake. Emma, 21, is “handsome, clever and rich,” a heroine, Austen wrote, “whom no one but myself will much like". Emma is a matchmaker extraordinaire, ironically unaware of the love match in her own life. Emma revolves around puns, reversals, surprises, even tricks of the weather – who but Austen would write a scene in which a declaration of love comes out of the blue, thanks to a sunny break in an otherwise cold rainy July day?. (Penguin Classics)

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  Virginia Woolf, The Waves

  Woolf’s 1931 novel The Waves was her most experimental, poetic, impressionistic book. She described it as “an abstract mystical eyeless book, a play poem.” She structures the book via a cycle of a day, from dawn to night. Woolf builds images of waves breaking, follows the rhythm of the sea, and adds six interior voices – six aspects of the self, cast against the landscape of the day. How better to describe the 'must dos’ of the quotidian (and the preciousness of life) than with this line: “Knock, knock, knock. Must, must, must. Must go, must sleep, must wake, must get up – sober, merciful word which we pretend to revile, which we press tight to our hearts, without which we should be undone." The Waves must be read slowly to absorb the poetry of each line. (Penguin Modern Classics)

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  Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

  Thirty years ago Margaret Atwood used her speculative genius to create this dystopian novel about an ultra-fundamentalist theocratic takeover of the United States. It begins with a staged terrorist attack on the president and congress blamed on Muslim extremists. The new government, Gilead, restores the patriarchy. Women who once had lived independently, supporting themselves, are subjugated. Offred, Atwood’s narrator, is considered lucky; she is a handmaid to a commander’s wife, used for breeding purposes only. (This practice is justified by the biblical passage in which Jacob’s infertile wife Rachel calls upon her maid Bilhah to bear children for her.) Offred is a spiky creature, privately subversive, haunted by memories of her husband Luke and her daughter, who were stripped from her during a failed escape. Reading this chillingly prescient novel brings us inside the nightmare she is living. (Vintage)

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  Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

  First published in 1847, Jane Eyre still offers a dark romantic appeal. Brontë’s Jane, an orphan hired as a governess, is an intimate and engaging first-person narrator. And Brontë has a head-spinning way with plot. Jane goes from being smitten by her employer, the moody Mr Rochester, to a cold, horrid rejection (“…faith was blighted, confidence destroyed! Mr. Rochester was not to me what he had been.”). Mr Rochester’s Creole wife, Bertha Mason, is a major figure in her own right. She gives the title to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s landmark of feminist literary criticism, The Madwoman in the Attic, and is the key figure in The Wide Sargasso Sea, a 1966 prequel, in which Jean Rhys imagines a white Creole heiress spirited away from her Caribbean home to England, going mad after being confined to an attic by her English husband. (Penguin Classics)

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  Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing

  Lessing left Africa in 1949, carrying with her the manuscript of her first novel. The Grass is Singing, published in 1950, opens with a news report: “Mary Turner, wife of Richard Turner, a farmer at Ngesi, was found murdered on the front veranda of their homestead yesterday morning. The houseboy, who has been arrested, has confessed to the crime.” Lessing’s piercing psychological portrait of the effects of institutionalised racism on one household draws upon her early years in colonial Rhodesia. “I hated the life, the society – one hundred thousand whites commanded half a million blacks in old Southern Rhodesia,” she has said. Read this first book as the wellspring of Lessing’s passion. She published more than 50 books, including classics like The Golden Notebook and the Martha Quest series. When awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature she was cited as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny." (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

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  Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March

  Bellow’s first novel, Dangling Man, was the fragmentary journal-style novel of a man awaiting the draft into World War II. His second, The Victim, was a constricted narrative focused on anti-Semitism. With his breakthrough 1953 book The Adventures of Augie March, Bellow opened the door for future narratives of the immigrant experience, introducing a vernacular that included the rhythms and linguistic complexity of multiple cultures. Listen to the opening: “I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago, that somber city – and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted…” Bellow’s centenary year is a good time to honour this bold voice, so fresh in its time. (Penguin Modern Classics)

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  Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

  Tolstoy’s tragic novel of love and infidelity, published serially between 1873 and 1877, gave us glorious insights like this: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The award-winning 2000 translation by the legendary Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, who have brought back most of 19thCentury Russian literature, is clear as a bell, elegant and moving. Their introduction is an ideal guide, giving background on controversies of the 1870s that shaped Tolstoy’s attitudes and tone, and the real incident in 1872 that suggested to Tolstoy his heroine’s fate. Tolstoy initially planned the book to be a tale of adultery involving the dashing Count Vronsky and Anna, the married woman who risks everything. As he worked, it grew into the story of seven main characters, with one always out of balance, on the outside looking in. (Penguin Classics)

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  Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now

  If you've missed Trollope, this 1875 novel is the one with which to start. The financier Augustus Marmotte, a Victorian-era Bernie Madoff (Trollope describes him as a "horrid, big rich scoundrel"), and Lady Carbury, a faux author and manipulator par excellence, are at the centre of a plot that involves scandals, swindles and corruption. A memorable American character named Winifred Hurtle is involved with Lady Carbury’s son Roger (he visualised all American women as being “loud, masculine and athiestical”). With their wealthy cohort, they operate within the greed-saturated centre of a speculative bubble in 1870s London that seems ideal for Trollope’s brand of social satire. As Henry James put it, “A more copious record of disagreeable matters could scarcely be imagined… than The Way We Live Now.” One of the last serialized Victorian door-stop novels, it’s still timely today. (Penguin Classics)