Turning over a new leaf

‘Read more books’. It’s a staple New Year’s resolution, and one that was all over Twitter come January 1st. Of course, it’s unlikely to be a priority for Bookdiva fans. A few years ago I actually made a resolution to read fewer books – the idea being that I would then do more, well, sleeping. Or skydiving. Or something. But that swiftly went the way of ‘be nicer to my mother’ and ‘learn to tango just like the sexy Roxanne bit in Moulin Rouge.’

Perhaps the second most popular literary NYR is to ‘read the classics’. Now, the phrase alone evokes such a dusty tundra of pompous polysyllables that even the most enthusiastic self-betterer inevitably starts to have doubts by the 2nd and reaches for a Freya North to go with the leftover coffee creams, but the concept of nailing the canon still exerts a huge cultural hold.

This is proved by the BBC Top 100 Must-Read Books List, aka The Facebook Meme That Will Not Die. This has been doing the rounds for over two years, but resurfaced yet again last week in a friend’s feed as if summoned by the guilt-laced January air. It takes the form of an apparently apocryphal BBC list of 100 must-read books, which claims that the average person has read only six, and exhorts recipients to mark those they have read (usually in bold) and those they started but did not finish or partially read (italics), and then forward to fellow book nerds in an orgy of erudite one-upmanship.

The list is as meaningless as these things always are. The Da Vinci Code is on there, for God’s sake – The Da Vinci Code! – and that sentimental Mitch Albom tosh that sounds like an Eric Clapton song. And the only list Zola’s Germinal belongs on is the BBC Top 100 Must-Kill-Yourself Books, alongside The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. But it’s also as compulsive as these things always are, which is no doubt why it continues to terrorise social media. I actually found myself wondering whether skipping over the stupid Elvish songs in Lord of The Rings merited a demotion to italicised partial-completion (I decided yes); or whether I should resign from this column immediately because I have no idea who John Kennedy Toole is (I decided, after a brief Google, no).

Overall, I was pretty smug at my total (69 read fully, 5 partially) but I was also saddened at the reminder of how eclectic my reading used to be. I read most of those ‘classics’ at least ten years ago. School curriculae are always contentious, but at least they force our young selves to explore old white Englishmen one term and black American poetesses the next. Add to that the curiosity of youth, blended with a craving for worldly sophistication, and you have a recipe for a broad reading diet. But as with so many things, age petrifies.

It’s so easy to get trapped in a genre. I’ve been wandering around in the comforting great hall of historical drama for most of the winter and it’ll take a bracing effort to clamber out into the cold wind of a political satire, or the dark alley of an urban crime. A surprising number of people stake their claim wholly in the fiction or non-fiction camp and make only the occasional sally into enemy territory before retreating back to Dawkins or Dickens; I’m not quite that bad. I have bought and I fully intend to tackle Helen Castor’s She Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth. Just as soon as I finish the remaining 450 pages of Dorothy Dunnett’s eleventh-century Macbeth saga King Hereafter (I’m half way through.)

So this year’s more realistic, and genuinely fruitful, resolution is to read different books. For me that means more American and Japanese – classic or new – more biographies, more debut novels and more science. Yes, I have gained self-enlightenment from Facebook – it happened once before, in an unauthorised-photo-tagging shocker that taught me I really needed to pluck my eyebrows because I was starting to look like my cousin Tom – and I am determined to act.

Pass the strawberry centres and the Fry Chronicles (who said anything about originality?) May it be a book-packed, habit-busting, monobrow-free 2011 for us all.