Reading

How reading changes me.

My Reading List For 2025 is at the bottom of the page.

One of the effects of having a terminal illness that debilitates much of the physical activity I used to fill my day with is the opening up of time. Long periods of not setting foot out of the house, certainly in winter, eliminates a huge swathe of taken for granted acts: popping to the shops, taking Scout for a long walk, heading into town to buy books. And housework: cleaning, general maintenance, clothing, washing dishes, cooking.

Remove all of those and more that I won’t notice until I need to and the empty hours grow to such an extent that I stop measuring the passage of time by minutes and hours, but by a.m. and p.m. Then by waking and sleeping, the waiting at the gate before sleep time can be accessed. As months flow by the days merge, often I find myself asking Alison what day it is or if she is not around flicking my phone screen on. The only time punctuation in my day is midday when an alarm tells me I have to take some drugs.

Nature abhors a vacuum and I have an inkling does time. Time hates idle hands and minds and seeks ways of filling the emptiness. I’ve written before about doing nothing, and I still hold that as a goal it is crucial for my well-being to be able to sit and let the mind wander of its own free will. For me, it opens up connections that have rusted together and become unknowable.

As the flakes of rotten thoughts fall away I see . . . what do I see? A mass of confusion that is trying to coalesce into something recognisable and useful. It takes time. Often there is no clarity. Occasionally the usefulness appears during the uncovering of another, what I call nodes, those connections of pathways that touch and spark off each other in my brain. Then I see the point of that long ago miasma of cluttered thinking.

What I had not expected in all of this was the importance and significance of reading. Reading has become a tutor to me. It still entertains, most of the time, but there is something else going on when I read. Reading literature, novels, poetry, short-story, plays, philosophical texts educates better than any self-help book on say ‘How to Die Without Annoying People’.

Reading a variety of genres and periods illuminates the importance of building literature for my reading and writing from the ground up. Read the Greek philosophers, the Roman historians, and I find that today very little is original, a thought or phrase can always be traced backwards until the thread disappears in mists.

Reading, and subsequently writing by hand or tapping on a keyboard, has filled the space that was there in front of me when yomping across moors was no longer a thing for me. I make time for reading. No T.V. And no Smartphone. Those were the two biggest thieves of time in my day. There were more than enough hours, the same as anyone else, I just used to employ them without thought and they became empty wrappers in a bin.

What do I like to read? Below is my reading record for twenty-twenty-five. Almost one hundred and thirty books that range from epic tales, short stories, poetry, literary craft. Most are new reads to me and that maybe surprising considering some of the titles. For example, I should not have had to wait until my mid-sixties to read the Greek philosophers, or Shakespeare, We, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Hemingway, surely these should have been school reads? Alas not.

Reading the great works has honed my own craft, I see what is possible, how a structure an make a story run fast or slow, change direction, bring tension and fear. I get to think about myself, see me in the stories, watch Maxim de Winter - move from dealing with trauma, to a man to be cherished and loved, and think yes, that’s me, I was like that and I can change.

Studying Montaigne’s essays was like following a compass bearing. How to live, how to conduct a life. He steals from Greek and Roman of course and that leads me as a reader to them, and the thought process is further cemented. Nothing is new under the sun. (I think that was Lao Tzu.)

Much that I thought was not worthy in my not to distant past has proved to be the opposite. I read Wuthering Heights for the first time this week. It is an amazing work, much better than any of Charlotte Bronte’s work. Wuthering Heights is technically, significantly ahead of other novels from that period; the nesting of frames within frames, narrators within narrators is wondrously crafted.

And I have a direct connection. Some years past we had a three day search for a missing seventy year old male on the moors above Howarth. He was found, alive and recovered. The search centred around Wuthering Heights, much as Nells search for Cathy. I could see the landscape that I myself trod. Of course, Jane Eyre, lived not to far from me, and I trod those roads regularly once. I would not have known any of that if I had not read the books. That for me is an education.

Some books and authors missed the mark, for me. I cannot see why Boccaccio’s, The Decameron, is lauded as it is, it is page after page of drivel. My opinion of course, and a few thousand others on review sites. But he is old lit, that could never happen with new literature. Try Martin Amis. It is page after page of pretentious, patronising nonsense. If he was trying to eclipse his father he burned up still in the atmosphere of sixth-form final project. Kingsley wrote about what he knew, and made it funny. Martin wrote about what he thought was clever and strung words together that had no real meaning on characters that had less depth than the page itself. I don’t see it.

Much better are Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, Beowulf; these are fine works that not only entertain, they ask me to think and to apply the lessons I can learn. Follow Dante and Virgil and see how there experiences influence life today, about actions now and the consequences further down the years. You could read Dicken’s A Christmas Carol and hopefully have the same realisation. But then you would miss Dante’s summit and onto Paradise.

I try to mix in plenty of contemporary and classical modern English and American literature. The Bell Jar was most enjoyable, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a further reading and the first time I realised she was a prostitute, have I led such a sheltered life?

Sometimes, I get a pleasant surprise: Butter (I now eat rice with butter and soy sauce, it is delicious). Arabian Sands, how men used to be, compare Thesiger to Chatwin and see which you would prefer for company? I know who I would sit beside. Eileen and A Land In Winter brought me new writers to absorb. Sally Rooney I am becoming more and more enamoured with, I find her writing exciting and thought provoking.

For horror I had Wilde, Shelley, Zamyatin and Orwell and I learn that 1984 owed much to WE. Though for horror I don’t think you can beat The Bible, in fact anything we would not want the neighbours to know about can be found in a good Christian text.

In September I decided to re-read a book I liked each month, these are designated (+) the number of plus symbols indicate how many times I have read the work. I think this is good practice, it is a constant re-evaluation of what I consider to be the best of literature, my own personal canon, if you will.

My best read of the year has to be probably the shortest. Kafka’s, The Metamorphosis. A simple text that provokes horror and revulsion and pity all at the same time. It is such a brilliant work, emotional, visual, unbalancing. Others, To Kill A Mockingbird, Wuthering Heights, Stoner, The Golden Ass, On Chesil Beach, Hamlet, King Lear, The Lost Estate, Beowulf and The Old Man and the Sea.

Have I benefited from all this reading? Yes undoubtably. How has it changed me? My perspective on life is much wider and longer now. Reading across centuries demonstrates to me that humans are prey to the self same triumphs and follies no matter the when, how, who or where. The words I have read have made me less critical, more accepting (notwithstanding Boccaccio and Amis) and more understanding. My time has been filled with many other worlds and a clearer view of the past worlds I used to inhabit.

Take care and good luck

Paul

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Reading Record 2025

January

To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Normal People by Sally Rooney

Letters To Sartre by Simone De Beauvoir

If Morning Ever Comes by Anne Tyler

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

Tracks by Robyn Davidson

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

The Lucky Ones by Rachel Cusk

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle

February

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

Poetics by Aristotle

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Sidelines by Michael Longley

The Crucible by Arthur Miller

The Epic of Gilgamesh by Sinn-leqi-unninni (?)

Dhammapada by Buddha (?)

Stoner by John Williams

Book of Genesis KJVB

Ecclesiastes KJVB

Gospel of Matthew KJVB

Gospel of Mark KJVB

Gospel of Luke KJVB

Gospel of John KJVB

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Koran by Mohammed (?)

A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro

Selected Poems by Rumi

The Lady in the Looking Glass by Virginia Woolf

March

The Aeneid by Virgil

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

French Short Stories Anthology

Bonjour Tristesse by François Sagan

The Complete Essays by Michel de Montaigne

Thérèse Raquin by Émile Zola

April

Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain

The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne

Nutshell by Ian McEwen

Collected Stories by Paul Bowles

How To Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

How To Read A Book by Mortimer Adler

May

Babylon Revisited by F Scott Fitzgerald

London Fields by Martin Amis

The Golden Ass by Apuleius

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

Storm by George R Stewart

The People In The Trees by Hanya Yanagihara

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

The Tin Can Tree by Anne Tyler

June

Butter by Asako Yuzuki

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

The Art of Happiness by Epicurus

Fine Just The Way It Is by Annie Proulx

James Joyce: Biography by Richard Ellmann

Oxygen by Andrew Miller

The Waste Land and Other Writings by T S Eliot

July

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

A Return To Solitude by Anthony Storr

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor

In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

In Search of a Character by Graham Greene

La Vita Nuova by Dante Alighieri

August

Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John Le Carré

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harpur Lee

The Information by Martin Amis

Nineteen-Eighty-Four by George Orwell

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Volume 1, 1929-1940 by Samuel Beckett

Divine Comedy - Inferno by Dante Alighieri

September

Close Range by Annie Proulx (++)

Metaphysics by Aristotle

Divine Comedy - Purgatory by Dante Alighieri

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (++)

Atonement by Ian McEwan

Herzog by Saul Bellow

October

Slightly Foxed No. 86 Summer 2025 Anthology

The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (++)

Divine Comedy - Paradise by Dante Alighieri

The Three Musketeers by Alexander Dumas

Eileen by Otessa Moshfegh

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley

King Lear by William Shakespeare

Contemporary British Short Story by Philip Hensher (ed)

Oh William by Elizabeth Strout

Cider With Rosie by Laurie Lee

Animal Farm by George Orwell

November

Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Beowulf by Unknown

Think Write Speak by Vladimir Nabokov

Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote (++)

The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow

The Lost Estate by Alain-Fournier

Romeo And Juliet by William Shakespeare

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

The Periodic Table by Primo Levi

December

The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio

A Land In Winter by Andrew Miller

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

Of Walking In Ice by Werner Herzog (++)

Villette by Charlotte Brontë

In A Strange Room by Damon Galgut

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (+++)

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

The Stranger by Albert Camus

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess