Happy New Year to you all! Belated, I’m afraid. But it’s only now, Twelfth Night and the end of Christmas, that the new year begins properly for me, only now that I can crawl out from under the pine boughs and look out at the year ahead.
(Happy Misrule!)
(Jan Steen, Twelfth-Night Feast, oil, 1662; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
I always enjoy reading everyone’s end-of-year round-ups and plans for the next twelve months’ reading. For me, 2013 was a bit patchy: I read plenty of good books but drifted about a lot in between, unable to find something which suited me. It was a year of unfinished books and I hate failing to finish a book (unless it’s crap). So, 2014 can only be better!
I’m not much of a planner, and mainly intend to follow Stefanie’s excellent maxim: read good books. But I have tentatively elected to dance to the music of time with Ali, and I intend also to read a chapter of The Morville Hours every month. In addition, I’ll be more scrupulous in writing about the Grimms’ tales and I’ll get back into the saddle with my Modernist reading, which fell by the wayside after a disagreement with Gertrude Stein (I was entirely to blame).
Alternatively, I’ll continue with my usual modus operandi of alighting on whatever takes my fancy at any given moment.
Do you have reading plans for 2014?