Literary Resolutions

“Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions”, wrote Mark Twain in Nevada’s Territorial Enterprise on January 1, 1863. “Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.”

A century and a half later, we’re still deluding ourselves. A recent survey shows that four out of five people will fail to keep their vows of self-improvement over the next twelve months, but we don’t need ‘research’ to tell us that New Year’s resolutions suck. Just maybe, if the calendar year started in spring, we would be up for abstinence and avocado; as it is, our serotonin-starved brains are still craving carbs, cashmere and television programmes featuring either Benedict Cumberbatch, a laborador, or both.

This does, however, make January the perfect time to upgrade your literary habits. Now is not the time for Norovirus-marinated gyms and desperate two-for-one bars. Now is the time for a quiet night in with a book, while grazing on leftover pigs-in-blankets and coffee creams. It’s frugal, it’s carbon neutral, it’s retro, it’s smug: in short, it’s so 2012.  Anyway, according to the British Liver Trust detoxing in January is futile, and Antony Horowitz’s new Sherlock Holmes novel is even better when you’ve got half an unfinished bottle of Advocaat propped beside the armchair.

So, what will yours be?

To come up with mine, I started by looking at what did and didn’t work last year. In my January 2011 Bookdiva column, I vowed to escape my fiction comfort zone and explore books I don’t naturally gravitate towards – more American and Japanese writers, more biographies, more debut novels and more science. Have I succeeded? Sort of. I’ve certainly scaled up my debut reading – Justin Torres’ We The Animals and Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! have been two of my recent favourites. I also did well with the Americans, once Franzen and Egan got me started on a transatlantic roll. And I’ve gorged on neuroscience – David Eagleman’s Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain rather appropriately blew my mind. But Japanese writers and biographies? Not so much. Although Christopher Ross’s Mishima’s Sword: Travels in Search of a Samurai Legend looks good, so maybe I can make up for both shortfallings in one go.

I then looked to others for ideas; Google ‘literary resolutions’ for plentiful inspiration. The LA Times has compiled edicts from 25 writers, editors and publishers, in which wasting less time on the internet/celebrity TV shows/porn is a recurring theme. On her charming blog Such A Book Nerd, Chicago bibliophile Jamie P. resolves to chip away at her bought-but-not-read book mountain and to visit book-related sites on her 2012 road trip. However, I like the three simple rules from Ruth Franklin at The New Republic best of all: read the same poem every day for a month; read a best-seller every year; read more of your kids’ books.

Of course, none of this really helped. The minimal-list that I eventually came up with was born from a messy internal cocktail of instinct, vagueness and self-interest. As all good resolutions should be.

1. Read more. This sounds bizarre coming from someone who bemoaned her unhealthy ‘reading addiction’ in a Guardian article a few years ago. My compulsion to consume words has not diminished; in fact, my promiscuous lust for technology ensures that I am positively drowning in prose. But how much of that translates into quality, concentrated reading – as opposed to browsing, scrolling, gobbling or scanning? It can be easy to forget the difference until those uninterrupted hours of Christmas hermitry remind you what reading really means. So I’m going to reject the free newspapers, cut down on the magazines and limit my time spent browsing my Reeder feeds. I’m going to cull the boxsets and the Sky Plus period trash. Instead, I’m going to sit down for more than ten minutes at a go, at times other than pre-sleep prostration or commuting coma. I’m going to book in entire antisocial evenings and Sundays, in order to read with concentration, dedication and thoughtfulness. Proper reading isn’t just for holidays, and I’m determined to prove it.
2. When I’m not reading, write. “When I want to read a good book”, said Benjamin Disraeli, “I write one.” When I think about hiding away to read a book I’ve just bought, I get excited to a semi-orgasmic, sweaty-palmed degree. When I think about working on my own novel, my palms moisten in a much less pleasant way. This year, every time I get writer’s fright, I will think back to my eight-year-old self. Free from pressure and preciousness, she loved writing just as much as reading. She couldn’t finish a chapter of someone else’s story without running into the garden in nothing but a nightie and narrating her own take. I vow to regain this easy, hungry joy in creating as well as consuming. Although Shoreditch Park probably requires pants.
3. When I’m not writing, pay attention. Because this is what stories are about, after all. People. Conversation. Life. The understanding of what we do, and how and why, and what it looks like and how it feels. Being a great reader, as much as a great writer, requires an ability to be present; to observe; and, free from ego, to empathise. Rather than seeing life as a string of irritating interruptions between one book and the next, I’ll shut up, breathe deep and pay attention. Which will probably be the hardest resolution of all, but undoubtedly the best.