Reading Resolutions

Andrew Seal has a nice post on reading resolutions for 2010. In addition to being a great reading list, it doubles as a nice reference to his excellent posts from last year.

Last year, I set as my purpose focusing on women authors and authors of color. Or, in my more combative terms, no white American men. The only breaks in this agenda were D. A. Powell’s Chronic and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, both of which I had compelling reasons for which to create exceptions (Powell was giving a reading in my city, and the whole Infinite Summer thing happened). Otherwise, I think I made some headway on addressing the gaps in my reading which provided the impetus for this program: I read a fair number of classics that I had skipped over before for whatever reason (Beloved, The Left Hand of Darkness, A Passage to India, A Bend in the River, Midnight’s Children, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, The Color Purple, Death Comes for the Archbishop, The House on Mango Street, The Trial, The Woman Warrior, Giovanni’s Room, Passing, The Awakening, Austerlitz, Blindness, Persuasion, The Golden Notebook, Three Lives) and gave myself some depth by reading some authors that aren’t quite so household names (but should be): Grace Paley, Cynthia Ozick, Gayl Jones, Alejo Carpentier, Tayeb Salih, Djuna Barnes, Sam Selvon, Nadine Gordimer, Tillie Olsen, Stanislaw Lem, César Aira, and others.

For the past couple of years I’ve done reading resolutions, but I don’t think I’ll do them this year, as I seem to quickly forget them as my reading heads off along its own tangled course. The one thing I would like to do, though, would be to read more hard nonfiction. I’m not entirely comfortable with the labels “fiction” and “nonfiction,” but there is a pretty clear dichotomy between literary style fiction and reportorial style hard nonfiction, and it’s the latter that I’d like to get into more. Each presents an essential piece of our human reality, and I think that this year I’ll be interested in getting a little more of that hard reportorial view of that.

The one resolution I will make and absolutely keep is to read the books I haven’t yet read from the 25-title strong Best Translated Book Award longlist, which should available for public consumption shortly.

Andrew also is planning a great project: he “would like to read at least one novel from each Latin American country this year.” As he notes, some nations will be tough to find a suitable novel from. Perhaps you’d like to help him out?

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