Okay, I know there’s another five weeks left in the year and I’ll probably knock over a couple of more books before Hogmanay but I present the books I have read so far in 2022 in no particular order in terms of when I read them or what I thought of them and I’m sure there will be some books missing from the list.
Two Centenaries in 2022
Ulysses
For book lovers, 2022 was the centenary of two literary events. It was the one hundredth anniversary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses. I bought two centenary editions of Ulysses. The first was the one hundredth anniversary Penguin cloth bound edition that I bought from Shakespeare and Co in Paris and it comes with a Shakespeare and Co stamp on the fly-leaf. Sylvia Beach who was the founder and owner of Shakespeare and Co arranged for the first publication. The other centenary edition of Ulysses that I bought was the Cambridge Centenary Ulysses. This is a massive book coming in at nearly four kilograms and is a facsimile of the first ever edition that was riddled with errors and substantially corrected prior to later editions (such as the three different Penguin editions I own) being printed and it also contains essays about each of the sections and a huge number of notations. This is a scholarly work that any Joycean would want to have (alongside the Ellman biography that sits on my shelf next to it. I also bought the collection of essays on Joyce edited by Colm Toibin – One Hundred Years of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Proust
The other centenary this year that occurred in the last week was the anniversary of the death of Marcel Proust. It is many years since I started to read In Search of Lost Time or, in the French La Recherche de Temps Perdu, and I should go back and finish the last couple of volumes of this large rambling and, at times, witty and sarcastic examination of French society during la belle époque.
My Reading List for 2022
Here it is an eclectic mixture of mainly fiction (both contemporary and classic) and some biography and memoir. I haven’t included the many books of poetry I have dipped in and out of this year or the reference books where I might have read a chapter or two and, of course my own books read many times – A Long the River Run published this year and Erosion to be published early next year and also The Unfinished Business of Fishermen due for publication later in 2023 and currently being revised and edited.
What was your favourite book in 2023? Why not leave me a message in the comments section? I might write some more next week about which of the books listed about I liked the most and why.