David's Insane Reading Project

About the time I turned fifty, I challenged myself to read a book published in each decade. On a yellow tablet, I put: 1990s, 1980s, 1970s, and so on (back to the Epic of Gilgamesh, I joked). At coffee one morning, a guy asked if I’d ever read John Fante. Never heard of him, I said. He loaned me his Black Sparrow edition of Ask the Dust [1939]. When I was done, I entered it on the yellow pad. Then I read Saturday Night and Sunday Morning [Alan Sillitoe, 1958], All the King’s Men [Robert Penn Warren, 1946], Hopscotch [Julio Cortazar, 1966], Mrs. Dalloway [Virginia Woolf, 1925] and New Grub Street [George Gissing, 1891]. All was copacetic. I read House of Mirth [Edith Wharton, 1905], Fathers and Sons [Ivan Turgenev, 1862].

I think the trouble started with Cold Comfort Farm [Stella Gibbons, 1932]. I already had the 1930s; I cribbed Gibbons in next to Fante anyway. Pretty soon they had company: Down and Out in Paris and London [George Orwell, 1933], They Shoot Horses, Don‘t They? [Horace McCoy, 1935], BUtterfield 8 [John O’Hara, 1935], Their Eyes Were Watching God [Zora Neale Hurston, 1937], Murphy [Samuel Beckett, 1938] The Big Sleep [Raymond Chandler, 1939], At Swim-Two-Birds [Flann O’Brien, 1939].

The yellow pad was an unholy mess.

Skipping ahead a bit . . .  My original project eventually morphed into Reading Back in Time: Read (at least) one book of prose literature published in each year. I’d been keeping track of my reading since 1979; I transcribed those titles from handwriting to Word file (along with ones from my earlier life as they came to me), organized by year of first publication, newest to oldest. I added three ground rules: a) I could read them in any order; b) there was no deadline (aside from the Big Deadline); and c) I couldn’t skip a book I knew I should read just because that year had already been checked off. 

In this way, I conned myself into reading Pride and Prejudice, The Count of Monte Cristo, Vanity Fair, Our Mutual Friend, Les Misérables, Middlemarch, War and Peace, etc., most of which I liked immensely. I discovered Zola’s twenty-novel cycle, Les Rougon-Macquart. I took a chance on other titles I knew by name only: My Ántonia [Willa Cather, 1918], The Country of the Pointed Firs [Sarah Orne Jewett, 1896], Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl [Harriet Jacobs, 1861], Two Years Before the Mast [Richard Henry Dana, 1840], Moll Flanders [Daniel Defoe, 1722].

All that was to the good, but there were other discoveries. I learned that James Fenimore Cooper could be read with unfeigned pleasure (besides The Last of the Mohicans [1826], I read his Revolutionary War espionage novel [The Spy, 1821]). Ditto, amazingly, Sir Walter Scott. On the treadmill one morning, I read Thomas Paine’s anti-religion screed [The Age of Reason, 1807] and my inner atheist almost whooped aloud. I read Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark [1796] by Mary Wollstonecraft (better known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman [1792]—and for dying soon after giving birth to the future Mary Shelley), and was struck by how often, despite the ardor of her feminism, the attitude of class privilege surfaces. I read The Turkish Embassy Letters by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu [1763], writer, wit, wife of England’s ambassador—beyond her literary claim to fame, she’s remembered for introducing the Ottoman practice of inoculation against smallpox into Britain. I read the first volume of The Memoirs of Harriette Wilson, Written By Herself [1825], which begins: "I shall not say how and why I became, at the age of fifteen, the mistress of the Earl of Craven" (fear not, she has plenty of other stuff to say). Then a pair of eye-opening memoirs: Mungo Park’s Travels into the Interior of Africa [1799] and Tent Life in Siberia [1870] by George Kennan (shirttail ancestor of Cold War diplomat George F. Kennan). The first attempt to lay a telegraph cable across the Atlantic having failed, the American Telegraph Company hatched a scheme to string wire from the Bering Straits across Siberia to Europe; Kennan and his team spent a couple of years plotting the route, securing timber, enduring insanely challenging conditions, but (the book’s triumph) he details as well their interactions with native, often nomadic, populations. A fascinating read. (Word eventually reached them that a second try at the Atlantic cable had succeeded; the whole Siberia project collapsed, virtually overnight.) 

                                                                         —excerpt from essay “Oblivion”