Mid-year reading review
As we are settling into mid-July, it’s time to sit down and review my reading decisions in the first half of 2024.
Reading statistics
Books read: 20.5
Pages read: approximately 5.9k
Poems read: 3
Time spent: an inordinate amount
If you’re wondering about the 0.5 of a book, it is the other half of Anna Karenina that I started last December but only finished mid-January.
The rest of the 20 books are comprised of :
4 non-fiction: What Matters in Jane Austen, Feel Good Productivity, Absolutely On Music, The Prince
3 memoirs: Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman, Down and Out in Paris and London, Travels with Charley
1 short story collection: The Periodic Table
1 essay collection: Essays by George Orwell
1 play: Romeo and Juliet
1 epic poem: Paradise Regained
And the remaining 9 books are fiction, categorised loosely by their culture:
2 Japanese: All the Lovers in the Night, Norwegian Wood
2 Russian: Master and Margarita, White Nights
2 Tolkien: Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers
3 Englishwomen: Emma, Tenant of the Wildfell Hall, To the Lighthouse
1 American: Slaughterhouse Five
And the three poems: Song of Myself, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on Melancholy
Honorary mention:
The Tale of Genji, which I started by the end of May but still slowly making my way through it.
Authors:
Leo Tolstoy, Mieko Kawakami, Haruki Murakami, Jane Austen, John Mullan, Anne Bronte, Richard Feynman, Niccolo Machiavelli, George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, John Steinbeck, Virginia Woolf, Primo Levi, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Fyodor Dostoevsky, J.R.R.Tolkien
Reflections
Though I’m a fan of lists and statistics, they always make me feel inadequate and detached. After compiling these statistics, I just shrugged and thought, ‘Well, there we go. That’s it. Nothing to be proud of, nothing to be ashamed of, just several books here and there.’
Reading is merely a hobby I very much enjoy. And these are just some plain numbers, some raw data to be analysed, to see if there is anything I can do to spice things up or slow things down. The last thing I want is to make anyone feel bad when they see this list and feel like they should be reading more. No, I should be reading less — and a post on this is still fermenting in my mind.
My instant reaction after looking at the breakdown:
What. A. Mess.
It’s all over the place! Here, there, everywhere! I almost don’t feel like sharing it. I know I’m a mood reader — I just read whatever I feel like in the moment, but looking at this list now I begin to wonder if it would be better to have an organised reading plan, if such a haphazard way of reading is really serving me.
Reading has always been a hobby, something that I don’t want to carefully plan or schedule. In fact, I have tried to plan out my monthly reads, but I never follow any of them. It defeats the purpose of a hobby to set goals like finishing x amount of books in a year; it has been my firm belief that a hobby should simply be something you enjoy and nothing more than that.
But what if I want to be a better reader? Surely I need to be more intentional about it? I want to be a ‘serious reader’ who is ‘well-read’. By that I mean read widely and deeply, having amassed a vast knowledge in various fields, be able to hold my own in a conversation with intelligent people, like what Ted describes in his post My Lifetime Reading Plan.
Therefore I wonder if it would be better to read with a goal, not the traditional kind of SMART goals (I’m allergic to these and to OKRs, a reaction from my corporate job) but a more visionary one to keep myself focused on certain points of interests. Perhaps it might do some good to put limits and boundaries on my reading, like creating a three-month reading goal with a main focus on a certain field and some side interests to foray into.
For example, I find the similarities between Bulgakov and Shostakovich very interesting, so perhaps I could dedicate a couple of weeks to learn more about the works of art produced during Stalin’s regime and how dictatorship affects or fuels creativity. It would be a package deal of history, literature, art, and essays. Sounds appealing!
Reading tags
Best book you have reread?
Emma, along with Juliet Stevenson’s audiobook. Oh, I can’t describe how much I enjoyed this reread! Jane Austen is a must-reread every year!
Best book you have read?
Lord of the Rings, hands down. It’s incredible.
I’m still in disbelief that I haven’t read Lord of the Rings until this year. These two notes sums it all up:
(so no spoilers, please! I’m still still making my way through Return of the King)
Best sequel you have read?
The Two Towers. The first book cast a splendid line; this one caught me and got me hooked.
Biggest disappointment?
Actually none?
Maybe Romeo and Juliet. It’s my first Shakespeare play but it was only slightly, ever so slightly, disappointing. It was very funny though, I didn’t expect it to be this hilarious.
Perhaps also Feel Good Productivity, but it was exactly what I expected. Is it counted if you already knew it’s going to be a disappointment?
Biggest surprise?
It’s no surprise to those who follow me but damn, George Orwell’s essays caught me off guard! They are splendid, each and every one of them! I daresay his essays are more important than his novels. It’s a shame that most people only know him by 1984 or Animal Farm. Read his non-fictional works!
Favourite new (to you) author?
Primo Levi. Love The Periodic Table, but the problem with translated works is the constant question of ‘Do I love the prose of the author or the translator?’
Newest fictional crush?
Aragorn, son of Arathorn, heir of Isildur, Elessar, the Elfstone, and a million more titles. Aragorn is such a crush-worthy character in the books, and Viggo Mortensen is also a damn fine lad in the movies.
On a side note I also love the bromance between Legolas and Gimli <3
Newest favourite character?
Gandalf and all the hobbits - Frodo, Bilbo, Merry, Pippin, oh, except Sam. Sorry, I’m not a huge fan of Sam.
And Treebeard! Gotta love the Ents!
Book that made you cry?
The Departure of Boromir in The Two Towers got me teary , especially with the songs :’(
Book that made you laugh?
Travels with Charley is hilarious! The first paragraph itself got me burst out laughing at the bookstore.
I know its authenticity is questionable, but it is very well-written. Steinbeck has a great sense of humor.
What books do you really need to read by the end of the year?
I really want to finish Tale of Genji. It’s been two months and I have only gotten through 200 out of the 1000++ pages. The blame is on Tolkien ;)
Some of the heavier reads I would like to get through:
Dante’s Inferno, Nietzsche (Thus Spoke Zarathustra or Beyond Good or Evil)
Thomas Hardy has been on my radar for ages but I haven’t gotten around to him. I’m really looking forward to reading Far from the Madding Crowd this year.
More Shakespeare. Also trying to fit in more non-fiction like biographies, histories, essays, literary criticisms. Would like to finish Feynman’s Six Easy Pieces and Six Not So Easy Pieces if possible. A Short History of Nearly Everything and Gun, Germs and Steel have been steadily accumulating dust.
Fernando Pessoa has been long overdue as well.
Alas, here we go again with the mess of another list.
Too many to read, yet too little time!
Hall of Quotes
I love collecting quotes and sharing them, so here I am having an extremely hard time choosing one quote from each book to share with you. Now is the time to grab a cup of coffee, sit back and enjoy!
All the Lovers in the Night
Just like Mitsutsuka said, the melody was full of the qualities of light, as if pointing gently toward something, or guiding something along, each sound twinkling through the veil of darkness that surrounded me when I close my eyes. In my chair, I surrendered myself to a world of sound that could only be described as sparkling. It made my head sway, and my breath grew deeper as my legs climbed up that evanescent staircase, each step a sheet of light. They would shimmer to life the second my sole made contact, then fizzle into stardust when I lifted my foot, only to be reborn as yet another step, gently showing me the way. That slowly winding spiral stairway of light ascended freely through the dark, and though I was unsure where it was taking me, or what I would find when I arrived, as long as the music was playing, I knew that there was nothing to fear, that I could go anywhere at all. As I climbed one step after another, I ran the soft part of my finger over every gleaming note, stringing them together in a necklace that I placed over my chest, or stretching them with both hands into a hoop of light that I could step inside and pass through, over and over.
Norwegian Wood
The night was dark, so dark I couldn't see my feet when I turned out my torch. Hundreds of fireflies drifted over the pool of water held back by the sluice gate, their hot glow reflected in the water like a shower of sparks.
I closed my eyes and steeped myself in that long-ago darkness. I heard the wind with unusual clarity. A light breeze swept past me, leaving strangely brilliant trails in the dark. I opened my eyes to find the darkness of the summer night a few degrees deeper than it had been.
[…]
Long after the firefly had disappeared, the trail of its light remained inside me, its pale, faint glow hovering on and on in the thick darkness behind my eyelids like a lost soul.
More than once I tried stretching my hand out in the dark. My fingers touched nothing. The faint glow remained, just beyond my grasp.
Emma
But Mr Elton had only drunk wine enough to elevate his spirits, not at all to confuse his intellects.
Human nature is so well disposed towards those who are in interesting situations, that a young person, who either marries or dies, is sure of being kindly spoken of.
I know this is quoted everywhere, but I simply can’t bring myself to omit this:
“I cannot make speeches, Emma;” — he soon resumed; and in a tone of such sincere, decided, intelligible tenderness as was tolerably convincing. — “If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. But you know what I am. — You hear nothing but truth from me. — I have blamed you, and lectured you, and you have borne it as no other woman in England would have borne it. — Bear with the truths I would tell you now, dearest Emma, as well as you have borne with them. The manner, perhaps, may have as little to recommend them. God knows, I have been a very indifferent lover. — But you understand me. Yes, you see, you understand my feelings — and will return them if you can. At present, I ask only to hear, once to hear your voice.”
What Matters in Jane Austen
Her brilliance is in the style, not the content.
He (Henry James) just knew what he was doing, but then what he was doing was built on Jane Austen’s fearless innovations. It was Austen who had taught later novelists to filter narration through the minds of their own characters. It was Austen who made dialogue the evidence of motives that were never stated. It was Austen, a Jamesian avant la lettre, who made the morality with which her characters act depend on the nice judgements of her readers. Why should she not know what she was doing?
Tenant of the Wildfell Hall
I would not send a poor girl into the world, unarmed against her foes, and ignorant of the snares that beset her path; nor would I watch and guard her, till, deprived of self-respect and self-reliance, she lost the power or the will to watch and guard herself.
He knows he is my sun, but when he chooses to withhold his light, he would have my sky to be all darkness; he cannot bear that I should have a moon to mitigate the deprivation.
Fool that I was, to dream that I had strength and purity enough to save myself and him! Such vain presumption would be rightly served, if I should perish with him in the gulf from which I sought to save him!
Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman!
I wonder why. I wonder why.
I wonder why I wonder.
I wonder why I wonder why
I wonder why I wonder!
Furthermore, there was a rule that you never cleaned the gown, so you could tell a first-year man from a second-year man, from a third-year man, from a pig!
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.
The Prince
But men are so imprudent that they take up a diet which, as it tastes good to start with, they do not realize is poisonous.
None the less, the less a man has relied on fortune the stronger he has made his position. […] And when we come to examine their actions and lives, they do not seem to have had from fortune anything other than opportunity. Fortune, as it were, provided the matter but they gave it its form; without opportunity their prowess would have been extinguished, and without such prowess the opportunity would have come in vain.
Master and Margarita
Manuscripts don’t burn.
So, then, to convince yourself that Dostoyevsky was a writer, do you have to ask for his identification card? Just take any five pages from any one of his novels and you’ll be convinced, without any identification card, that you’re dealing with a writer. And I don’t think he even had any identification card! […] A writer is defined not by any identity card, but by what he writes.
You utter your words as if you don’t acknowledge shadows, or evil either. Kindly consider the question: what would your good do if evil do not exist, and what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it? Shadows are cast by objects and people. Here is the shadow of my sword. Trees and living beings also have shadows. Do you want to skin the whole earth, tearing all the trees and living things off it, because of your fantasy of enjoying bare light? You’re stupid.
Down and Out in Paris and London
For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.
When you have a hundred francs in the world you are liable to the most craven panics. When you have only three francs you are quite indifferent; for three francs will feed you till tomorrow, and you cannot think further than that.
A rich man who happens to be intellectually honest, if he is questioned about the improvement of working conditions, usually says something like this:
‘We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it is so remote, we rather enjoy harrowing ourselves with the thought of its unpleasantness. But don’t expect us to do anything about it. We are sorry for you lower classes, just as we are sorry for a cat with the mange, but we will fight like devils against any improvement of your condition. We feel that you are much safer as you are. The present state of affairs suits us, and we are not going to take the risk of setting you free, even by an extra hour a day. So, dear brothers, since evidently you must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be damned to you.’
Slaughterhouse Five
So it goes.
‘poo-tee-weet’
(If you know, you know *winks)
Travels with Charley
When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked.
To the Lighthouse
For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of — to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless.
Our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.
And she wanted to say not one thing, but everything. Little words that broke up the thought and dismembered it said nothing. ‘About life, about death; about Mrs Ramsay’ — no, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. Then one gave it up; then the idea sunk back again; then one became like most middle-aged people, cautious, furtive, with wrinkles between the eyes and a look of perpetual apprehension. For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there?
The Periodic Table
It was exalting to search and find, dredge up events from my memory and describe them with the greatest rigor and the least clutter. Paradoxically, my baggage of atrocious memories became a wealth, a seed; it seemed to be that, by writing, I was growing like a plant.
One should not surrender to incomprehensible matter, one must not just sit down. We are here for this — to make mistakes and to correct ourselves, to stand the blows and hand them out. We must never feel disarmed: nature is immense and complex, but it is not impermeable to the intelligence; we must circle around it, pierce and probe it, look for the opening or make it.
Cerrato said seriously that indeed sometimes things went like that, and that he would try to come up with something; but in general it was really dark all the time. You couldn't see the glimmer, you beat your head again and again against an ever lower ceiling, and ended by coming out of the cave on your hands and knees and backward, a little older than when you went in.
The trade of chemist (fortified, in my case, by the experience of Auschwitz) teaches you to overcome, indeed to ignore, certain revulsions that are neither necessary or congenital: matter is matter, neither noble nor vile, infinitely transformable, and its proximate origin is of no importance whatsoever.
Romeo and Juliet
Paradise Regained
Extol not Riches then, the toil of Fools,
The wise man’s cumbrance if not snare, more apt
To slacken Virtue, and abate her edge,
Than prompt her to do aught may merit praise.
What if with like aversion I reject
Riches and Realms; yet for that a Crown,
Golden in show, is but a wreath of thorns,
Brings dangers, troubles, cares, and sleepless nights,
To him who wears the Regal Diadem,
When on his shoulders each man’s burden lies;
For therein stands the office of a King,
His Honour, Virtue, Merit and chief Praise,
That for the Public all this weight he bears.
Yet he who reigns within himself, and rules
Passions, Desires, and Fears, is more a King;
For what is glory but the blaze of fame,
The people’s praise, if always praise unmixt?
And what the people but a herd confus’d,
A miscellaneous rabble, who extol
Things vulgar, and well-weigh’d, scarce worth the praise
They praise and they admire they know not what;
And know not whom, but as one leads the other;
And what delight to be by such extoll’d,
To live upon their tongues and be their talk,
Of whom to be disprais’d were no small praise?
White Nights
You are outgrowing your former ideals: they are being smashed into dust, to bits and pieces; and if there is no other life, then you must build it from these bits and pieces. But meanwhile your soul yearns and pleads for something else! And in vain does the dreamer rake through his old dreams, as if they were ashes, searching in these ashes for at least some little spark, in order to fan it into flames, and with this rekindled fire warm his heart, which has grown cold, and resurrect in himself once again everything that he had held dear, that had touched his soul, that had made his blood boil, that had brought tears in his eyes and had so splendidly deceived him!
The Fellowship of the Rings
Many that lives deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.
I should like to save the Shire, if I could — though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them. But I don’t feel like that now. I feel that as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more bearable: I shall know that somewhere there is a firm foothold, even if my feet cannot stand there again.
The Two Towers
War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend: the city of the Men of Númenor; and I would have her loved for her memory, her ancientry, her beauty, and her present wisdom. Not feared, save as men may fear the dignity of a man, old and wise.
One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present; like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake. I don’t know, but it felt as if something that grew in the ground — asleep, you might say, or just feeling itself as something between root-tip and leaf-tip, between deep earth and sky had suddenly waked up, and as considering you with the same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years.
Essays by George Orwell
Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.
The truth, it is felt, becomes untruth when your enemy utters it.
When one thinks of the cruelty, squalor, and futility of war — and in this particular case of the intrigues, the persecutions, the lies and the misunderstandings — there is always the temptation to say: ‘One side is as bad as the other. I am neutral.’ In practice, however, one cannot be neutral, and there is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.
God, the King, the Empire, the Union Jack — all the overthrown idols can reappear under different names, and because they are not recognized for what they are they can be worshipped with a good conscience.
Absolutely on Music
For Seiji Ozawa, music was the indispensable fuel that kept him moving through life. Without periodic injections of live music into his veins, he could not go on living. There was only one way in this world for him to feel truly alive, and that was for him to create music with his own hands and to thrust it as a living, throbbing thing into the faces of an audience: “Here!” Who could possibly tell him to stop?
Silence is not just the absence of sound: there is a sound called silence.
There we have it — this is the end of the Hall of Quotes! As you may have noticed, I’m not very good at keeping it to only one quote per book; they are becoming more and more, longer and longer, but I still hope you enjoyed the walk through the mini gallery of book snippets! To the people who are still reading at this point, it would greatly appreciated if you leave an emoji of sparkles ✨ just so I know that I haven’t spent the entire weekend rummaging through books for nothing <3