Reading List

It's taken me a couple of years to get back in the habit of reading. Ever since I stopped the daily commute to work, I've found it difficult to set aside time for the luxury of fiction. Oh, there have been the odd exceptions: a Gaiman, Pratchett or Pullman. But no sustained book-after-book reading. No 700-page+ bury yourself and come up for air works.

Hour-long train journeys (well, 75-minutes plus delays, cancellations, engineering works and bomb alerts) meant I always carried at least one if not two books with me.

Since then, very little. I start a book, leave it for a while, fail to get back into it and give up.

I can't say it was a New Year Resolution (another subject for another post), but this year I have made a special, sustained effort and it seems to be working.

This is the list of books I have read. Apart from first and last, they are in no particular order - except I think the quality of the first helped as a springboard to the second, and so on it went. And I'm not boasting - no-one reads this rubbish, so who would listen to my boasts? This is just a list of very good books I happen to have read.

So, this year I have been mostly reading:

• Halting State by Charles Stross
• Odd And The Frost Giants by Neil Gaiman
• Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
• The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
• I Capture The Castle by Dodie Smith
• Sir Gawain And The Green Knight Trans. by Simon Armitage
• The Night Watch by Sarah Walters
• The Book Thief by Markus Zuzak
• Darkmans by Nicola Barker
• Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
• Notes From An Exhibition by Patrick Gale
• Once Upon A Time In The North by Philip Pullman
• Hogarth by Jenny Uglow

There were two failures:

• The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh
• The Enchantress Of Florence by Salman Rushdie

Perhaps I was being a little ambitious, but I will read both again.

And so - as night follows day and politicians follow sporting success - now that I'm reading regularly, the urge to write catches flame within me, and my demons come to snuff that flame out again.

To arms!