My 2012 Reading Challenge - Overview/ FreqAsQuests

So over the past several months, I’ve engaged myself in a reading challenge to get myself through half of TIME Magazine’s 100 GreatestNovels of All TIME (published in English since 1923) list, and about two weeks ago, I finished off the challenge. Over the coming weeks, therefore, I will be subjecting you to a commoditisation of my achievement by doing a countdown of the list, in order.*

Before I actually get down to the nuts & bolts, though, I thought I’d do an introductory post just answering some of the most Frequently Asked Questions (or, in more convenient form, FreqAsQuests) I’ve encountered while doing this challenge, and announcing that the list is forthcoming. So in no particular order, I present you with “Sam answers his critics”:

1) Why did you choose this particular list for a challenge?

Good question right off the bat. Good work, if this was what you were asking. I hit upon this list during some of my usual web browsing, and discovered that, by pure coincidence, I just happened to have been reading a lot of the books from this list during my usual reading. At the start of the year I’d made a conscious decision to branch out my reading a bit more into authors I hadn’t read much of, so Graham Greene, Doris Lessing, Joan Didion were already under my belt and yet also appeared on this list of 100 great novels. I then compiled a tally of how many I had already read, and it seemed perfectly feasible to finish reading half of this list by the end of the year. Considering I have since done just this, the perceived feasibility was vindicated.

2)      How did you manage to read 50 books in one year?

Less good question; in fact a bad one. As I just explained, I’d already read a few of them. In actual fact I only read about 38 or so this year; others had come up previously during uni courses or childhood reading (the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is on the list of course, and if you haven’t read that you’re probably Hitler). No more questions from you until you start listening better.

3)      How did you decide which particular books to read?

That’s a better question. Since the challenge was to get through half the books, I of course had to leave another half of the list by the wayside (or possibly to constitute next year’s reading challenge). The truth is my selection methods were hugely arbitrary. I sorted the list according to which ones I was most interested in (or felt most ‘necessary’ to read to broaden my literary horizons), and then basically just selected on the basis of desire to read firstly, and convenience/accessibility secondly. Some of these books I chose purely because my local library had them on the shelves, while others I went into bookshops specifically to buy because I wanted them. Other reasons came up along the way and I will discuss them as each book comes up.

4)      Were there any books you didn’t read that you wished you had?

Two, yes. I went into Kinokuniya with the pure intention of purchasing John LeCarré’s The Spy who Came in from the Cold, only to find that TIME Magazine’s esteem of that particular novel pales in comparison to the fact that there was a movie last year of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and seven years ago of The Constant Gardner and therefore the John LeCarré shelves should be piled waist-deep in several thousand copies of those two novels and virtually no others. This is not entirely true but it’s more cynical to put it this way. 

The other regret is The Sun Also Rises, mainly because after all this time I still haven’t read any Hemingway. If he’d had two books on this list, I may have been more inclined to head in that direction – I read Saul Bellow’s Herzog purely by virtue of Bellow having two books on the list itself - but with just the one, he just happened to fall by the wayside as did so many others.

5)      Would you like a rim job?

Ummm... I’m guessing this has something to do with cars? I don’t think it’s particularly relevant anyway, so no. Thank you anyway.

6)      How can you do a ‘countdown’ of the list? Surely subjective preference is arbitrary and transitory, and quantifying it in this way reduces the vast human literary experience to rigid calculation?

Meh.

7)      So, given that you are ruining the human experience and presuming to be able to freeze the subjective experience in time, how will you go about deciding on your ‘preferences’?

My brother Jez makes it easy with his Python-coded ‘sorting’ program which reduces the arduous task of deciding between 50 titles into a series of about 200 decisions about 2 titles at a time, ie. “do you prefer title A or title B?” and then after running through all the variables, spits out the ordered list of 50. It’s probably not the most efficient way of doing it, and occasionally a whim on one decision leads to a particular title ending up a lot higher than I’d anticipated (or lower), but that’s part of the fun of it.

8)      Doing a countdown from 50 to 1 is so mainstream, don’t you think?

Agreed. Therefore I’ll be doing my posts in an ironic, underground sort of order, namely starting by counting down 40-31, then 30-21, then jumping back to count UP 41-50. Then do my top 20-1. When this order of doing things is the way they start counting down Triple J’s Hottest 100, you’ll know that I did it before it was cool.

Seriously though, I’m doing it this way because the top 20 are obviously the ones I will most effusively praise, and the bottom 10 are those at which I will spit bilious venom, and these are the most fun posts to write. Therefore I’m getting the boring 40-21 titles out of the way first, to which I will largely be indifferent.

9)      What’s number 1?

Patience, darling. Patience.

10)   Why should I care what you think?

You shouldn’t, of course. But firstly, since you’re reading this blog at all and have read this far, you’re almost certainly my Mother (Hi, Mother), so therefore you have a slight interest in what I think. Secondly, I’m writing these posts less for the illumination of the masses and more just to act as a reference point for myself (so I can say at parties ‘that was my number 14 favourite novel of my 2012 reading challenge’ and sound like an anally retentive savant moron-type). So you can: A) pay heed to my like or dislike of particular titles and let it sway your fragile, unreliable opinion of what you should read/enjoy; or B) completely ignore what I say (although this would hurt my feelings, Mother); or C) disagree, if you are familiar with a particular title, and let me know in the comments.

I will be back anon, with numbers 40-31, after I've run the sorting program.

*. See FreqAsQuest number 8.