Unfinished Business: My One Sincere New Year's Resolution

Those That Sit And Wait

Reading Habits Gone To Seed
The last year was a fiction drought. Despicable behaviour on my part. A ravaging slight I have inflicted on my own character and intellect. Sad weakness riven through me. I started and finished one novel - Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino and that was that, and that was only because it was read in a sitting aligned perfectly in time with one train trip from L'A to London. If more than 105 minutes was required I might not have even read all of that. It would have been dropped without a single care into the literary scrapyard that has consumed my room. My attention span needs some serious fixing. Or a serious slap-a-thon.

It wasn't much better on the non-fiction front either: Bill Buford's magnificent cook memoir Heat, The Game - the pick-up artist's War and Peace - by Neil Strauss and Agnes Poirier's Touche: her "look at these crazy Engleesh; look at my crazy fellow Frenchies" polemic, was the sum of my other reading. A deeply pathetic effort further compounded by the shame I felt whenever I scanned my bookshelves back home this Yuletide and realised the fantastic amount of books I had read over the previous four years.

Now I just seem to buy books in robotic fashion and stack them as if they were mere objets d'art to gaze at and savour with my eyes and not things to be taken in hand and read and, perhaps even cherished, if I was fortunate to come into possession of a book that would instantly take my heart and my mind in either arm, and cradle or shake me ... obviously, in the most satisfying way possible.

Yet they do make a lovely backdrop for a book geek photo-pose. Backed by a towering terracotta army of paperbacks. Standing in front of them with misguided pride. And even when I started one whilst partaking of the public transport - a Giant Step in itself (ooh, look it's thelondonpaper! GRAB IT. MELT MY WITS TO MUSH, PLEASE) - having secreted one in my perfectly proportioned inside pocket, I would often return home having zipped through 30 or 40 pages and deposited them willy nilly in THAT scrapyard heap of countless lost words yet again and promptly forgot about them: just another of many unfulfilling flings with the proper printed page.

One more book in the unfinished piles. Piles being a fitting anatomical adjective in this case; the growing irritation of it all. Another failed attempt to get back into the literary groove. (But funny how it is always the fiction that gets dumped more easily than the journalistic books drawn from real life. Why is that? But when Fine Litooratwo-er gets its hooks into me, it often becomes an overwhelming, almost never-ending obsession. I eat up as much of the stuff as I can in as quick a time as possible. Reading five books a week was my average once. Crazy, yes. But bloody fantastic. My brain had never felt so nourished, so alive. I had never felt so intellectually poncified. Delusions of my own writerly grandeur was another symptom of this habit)

Things and thoughts came to a head. Therefore, a few days ago I swore it was time to do something about it. Once and for all!

I have a sizeable tally of books I have started that must be finished. I must complete the mission; every mission. This is my only New Year's Resolution. One I intend to take seriously.

The mission is this: I will read every one of the books I have embarked upon, and I will not begin or buy any books until this task has been completed; that's right - no new beginnings, no wandering into my local Oxfam and picking up another dozen dirt cheap novels (my God, I once went doolally wild on Elias Canetti autobiographies and Gore Vidal essay collections, and have I read more than five pages of any of them? You know the answer. But the LA Oxfam is magnificent for such neglected intellectual treasure troves.) If I can hold my attention still, gripping its arms and crushing them inwards until it is too paralysed to gallivant in any sodding direction while screaming "Where's the laptop? Give me the laptop!", as it seems to do in perpetuum, I know can rest easy in the knowledge that I can see some things through to the end. Things just like this. Some of "The Unfinished" have not been touched for two or even three years. Even if it takes me until the summer months they will all be read.

Do you want to know the exact length of the journey that stretches before me into an obscure future? I did an inventory (list! list! list!). Here are the books with the page numbers I had reached before something happened, something that stopped me in my reading tracks (though there is the fleeting thought that I gave up on them because I thought they were eroding my will to live and boring me senseless. That's a little worrying).

Bookmarked
Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon (p.378)
In a Free State - VS Naipaul (p.78)
Millions of Women are Waiting to Meet You - Sean Thomas (p.88)
Who Sleeps with Katz - Todd McEwen (p.92)
Henry and June - Anais Nin (p.130)
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne (p.57)
The Periodic Table - Primo Levi (p.138)
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (p.396)
The Sound and The Fury - William Faulkner (p.100)
No Place Like Home - Gary Younge (p.94)
Humphrey Clinker - Tobias Smollett (p.105)
Riddley Walker - Russell Hoban (p.10)
Young Adam - Alexander Trocchi (p.23)
Hollywood Babylon - Kenneth Anger (p.56)
Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (p. 21)
London Orbital - Iain Sinclair (p.17)
Beyond a Boundary - CLR James (p.77)
Darkness Visible - William Styron (p.9)
Bonjour Tristesse - Francoise Sagan (p.15)
Let It Come Down - Paul Bowles (p.176)
The Motel Life - Willy Vlautin (p.28)
The Man Who Loved Children - Christina Stead (p.68)
The Cadence of Grass - Thomas McGuane (p.39)
Summer of '49 - David Halberstam (p.52)
Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers - Tom Wolfe (p.24)
The Human Stain - Philip Roth (p.160)
Old Glory - Jonathan Raban (p.452)
The Night Buffalo - Guillermo Arriaga (p.82)
Imperium - Ryszard Kapuscinski (p.37)
Siddhartha - Herman Hesse (p.54)
Zazie in the Metro - Raymond Queneau (p.95)
This I Believe: An A-Z of a Writer's Life - Carlos Fuentes (p.230)
Oscar and Lucinda - Peter Carey (p.60)
The General of the Dead Army - Ismail Kadare (p.44)
London Fields - Martin Amis (p.15)
Saturday Night - Susan Orlean (p.62)
The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene (p.44)

A small matter of 37 books and a few thousand pages. Let me harbour thoughts of weeping.

So they will be piled high in an obvious location in my room, waiting for their completion. They will stare at me accusingly, hopefully. And I will respond by picking them up one by one and NOT chucking them out of the nearest window.

How will I tackle the time management needed to knock off the bastards? Simple. The regimen is this. Cut off the internet, like it was a gangrenous limb. The world wide web is the Nemean Lion that blocks my path, the technological devourer of my flakey attention. The primary rule being that I will allow myself only one hour in total on the blasted thing for playtime every day, while research and work obviously provide good enough excuses (i.e. the quest for monetary survival) to allow its use for further time-consuming purposes. I've been thinking about the amount of time spent crapping about on the information superhighway; my electronic simulacrum picking and poking at temporarily amusing roadkill again and again. Pondering this, it depresses me thoroughly. Tis time for drastic change.

I might even block my own use of YouTube. Entirely. Watching the same clips repeatedly (Russell Brand, Charlie Brooker, film trailers galore, Filipino felons dancing at gunpoint, safari animal battle royales) is not a good way to spend entire evenings and horrifying, bleeding great chunks of the wee small hours.

Fortuitously, the WGA strike means that new US TV show episodes will come to a shuddering halt in their entirety, so that gives me one reason to stay away from the insidious laptop screen and the streaming of ever distracting new episodes of such surprisingly compulsive new police dramas like Life (Damian "Not Just Another Quirky Hero Detective" Lewis is ace in what is essentially a freakily compulsive, some might say cynical modern take on The Count of Monte Cristo).

Every book completed will be dutifully logged here, so it's gonna get all literary. A capsule review will be posted once each one has been shut and dispatched to the realms of the truly second hand.

But there is far to go. So very far. Call it a mighty test of will. Call it me just trying to write a bloated, superfluous post. In that, I believe, I have already succeeded. Wish me luck, ye sniggering scoundrels all.