Christmas is here, which means it's time for that annual feature: Books I meant to read this year, but didn't quite get around to. It's a long list, so we may as well dive straight in, writes Frank McNally
There can hardly have been a better novel in 2006 than Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land(Bloomsbury €27). So John Banville says, anyway, and he would know. I was very excited when I bought the book. But now that I think of it, the excitement didn't last long enough for me to remember to take it out of the bag when I got home, because I haven't seen it since. That's if I did bring it home. I remember going to Marks & Spencers café afterwards. Maybe I left it there.
I love a good history book, and The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs Disraeli(Huchinson €25.99) by Richard Aldous seemed to fit the bill. The title is apparently taken from a chapter in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. And there is a certain irony in this because, while I meant to read the Aldous book this year and didn't, I had no intention of reading Alice in Wonderland, and thanks to my eight-year-old daughter, I read it four times! It doesn't get any better with repetition, I can tell you.
As Banville also said in this paper's Books of the Year review, poetry remains "the poor relation" of contemporary literature. I know what he means, and I try to keep in regular touch with that branch of the family, if only out of sympathy. But I had Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass(Penguin paperback stg£7.99) around for dinner a few months ago and the conversation just sagged. I had to go to bed early.
There was a time when, if my wife asked me to pick up some Milton in town, I might have come back with a copy of Paradise Lost (Penguin Classics stg£8.99). Three children later, I know that Milton is in fact a brand of disinfectant. I always remember to buy the 500ml bottle (Superquinn, €2.49) because the 1.25 litre bottle doesn't fit in the press under the sink. Of course, I still plan to read Paradise Losteventually. In the meantime, to paraphrase the poet: they also serve who only shop and wait.
It's a few years since I bought In Search of Schrodinger's Cat(Corgi paperback stg£8.99), John Gribbin's brave attempt to make quantum physics accessible to a mass readership. The book's title refers to the famous "thought experiment" in which a cat could be both alive and dead at the same time. Quantum mechanics is so strange that Einstein devised the phrase "spooky action at a distance" to describe the things that happen in it, or seem to happen. Unfortunately I can't say anything more about Gribbin's book because my dog (also Corgi, €65) ate it. The weird thing is, I don't even have a dog.
When I first read Joyce's Ulyssesin my early 20s, it was a bit like running the Dublin City Marathon. It was all about getting finished, so I could say I'd done it. I was flying early on and quite enjoying it, but I hit the wall around the chapter in Barney Kieran's pub in Little Britain Street, where conditions became very windy. After that it was all uphill. I vaguely remember the episode in Holles Street. But as for Molly Bloom's soliloquy, I was in a stream of semi-consciousness by then.
Anyway, I meant to attempt it again this year, starting on Bloomsday. Sadly I tweaked my hamstring on June 15th, just thinking about it. I have since resumed light training and now plan to complete the course in 2007.
My attempts to read Dostoevsky are usually thwarted by the condition known as "reader's block". Despite this, I got as far as page 150 of Crime and Punishmentduring the summer, before fate intervened. I had read this novel before too, 20 years ago, and I thought it might remind me of my youth.
Unfortunately I left it on a bus (the book, that is, not my youth: I don't know where I left that).
Three times I have tried to read the cult classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenanceby Robert M. Pirsig, and always gave up half-way through. But I came across it by chance in the living-room this year and, suddenly, I couldn't put it down. It had been coated in some strange, sticky substance, possibly from one of my children's art projects. Luckily it wasn't Superglue and I did manage to let go of it eventually, making a mental note to try and read it again when it dries.
Finally, 2006 also saw the publication of a series called Books that Shook the World, which included Janet Browne's widely praised introduction to Darwin's The Origin of Species(Atlantic stg£9.99). I didn't read this either, but it reminded me to have another go at Darwin's famous volume, a second-hand copy of which I picked up somewhere years ago.
Unfortunately, the book's spine had been broken, the binding had come loose and, as I now discover, pages 53-57 have since fallen out. Until I find this "missing link" in Darwin's theory, there seems little point in reading it.