A reader asks if I have drawn up my list of New Year’s Resolutions and do they include the books I intend to read in the coming year. Sorry to say, my answers are no and no. I don’t mean to sound contrary but I have never made resolutions. The future has always seemed unreal, a blank movie screen, while the past feels real and ever-present. Memory is more vivid than fantasy and hope. Perhaps I lack imagination. William Hazlitt in his essay “On the Past and Future” (1822) is helpful:
“I have some desire to
enjoy the present good, and some fondness for the past; but I am not at all
given to build castles in the air, nor to look forward with much confidence or
hope to the brilliant illusions held out by the future.”
Also, I know from
experience that profound changes in behavior and even personality are possible,
whether kicking smack or reading Proust. We are not stuck with who we are, but
the future has nothing to do with that. We change incrementally, reluctantly and
only in the present.
About resolving to read certain books – I have never done
that. Clifton Fadiman’s “Lifetime Reading Plan” is well-intentioned and very
American in its can-do optimism but has always seemed to me like a joke. I
never plan even the next book, let alone a lifetime’s worth of them. Another
blogger invited me to take part in an online reading group. That was thoughtful
of her and I’m grateful but I’ve never been a joiner and would probably sit in
a digital corner, keep my mouth shut and read something that’s not in the
curriculum.
I come down in the middle, I suppose - I generally "read by whim" but I also have a few books that I want to get to in 2022: The Good Soldier, Brideshead Revisited, and Under the Volcano, and I have a friend that I read a spring and a fall book with every year. This year it will be An American Tragedy and Phineas Finn (our fall book is always a Trollope).
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