I feel bad about my unread books
And I've made a plan to do something about it this year
Like many book lovers, I’m pretty obsessed with buying and owning books. It’s the main thing I buy, apart from food. I get excited about a new release from a favourite author, and one of my preferred pastimes is hunting for books in charity shops.
I try not to feel too guilty about this. There are worse things to be obsessed with buying (I was going to put ‘like cars’ here, but I don’t want to be judgemental about people who love buying cars). As long as I try to buy secondhand as much as possible, I feel I can somewhat justify it.
The only issue is that I now have a lot of books. Not only do they take up space (which I don’t really have), but I’m struggling to read them all. One category of books that seem to suffer the most in terms of going unread is the ‘classics’.
What is it about older books that make so many of us put off reading them? I guess it’s the idea that they might be ‘difficult’ or ‘boring’, which, when you think about it, is a bit mad because there must be a reason why they were so popular and are still beloved by so many.
So, the plan. This year, I am going to read one unread classic book from my bookshelf each month. I decided to go for the oldest books I have, so I haven’t included any ‘modern classics’.
The oldest unread book on my bookshelf is Jane Austen’s Emma, which was first published in 1815. The most recent on my list is To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, published in 1960. So there’s your timeframe.
I’ve assigned each book a month, mostly going by which one feels the most suited to a particular month, vibe-wise and story-wise. But essentially, it’s quite random.
I was lucky to discover
at the end of 2024. Not only is he doing a year-long slow read of Anna Karenina, one of the books that’s probably been on my bookshelf the longest, but in February, he’s doing a read-along of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, which I bought about a year ago and started reading, only to give up on it very quickly. I don’t know why this happened, as I have enjoyed reading Austen in the past; I think sometimes it’s just not the right time for a book, and I’m excited to try again.The Books
Year-long slow read:
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy (1878)
Monthly:
January: Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf (1925)
February: Persuasion, Jane Austen (1817)
March: To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee (1960)
April: Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), Nella Larsen
May: And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie (1939)
June: Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
July: Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh (1945)
August: Emma, Jane Austen (1815)
September: Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier (1938)
October: A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf (1929)
November: The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett (1911)
December: A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens (1843)
I’ll try to keep you updated with how it’s going. I also have a lot of unread nonfiction on my bookshelf, so I’ve set myself a similar, although less organised, task of reading one nonfiction book per month this year as well. Maybe I’ll write about that at some point.
That’s all for now folks. Have a lovely weekend!
I opted to do the same thing last year. One a month is very doable.
Some excellent books on that list - enjoy!