Reading

Somewhere along the line, I fell out of love with reading.

As a child, I couldn't get enough. With a foundation, like the majority of British kids, in the works of Roald Dahl, I progressed to the classics between the ages of around seven and fourteen, encountered a brief dry spell, and then immersed myself in modernism over the course of my A Levels like any good pretentious aspiring arts student should.

But the next five years were about to drive me into the ground.

While I didn't dedicate every waking hour of my life to the library (hardly any in fact since I preferred to work from my room), a degree in French and German followed by an MA in Translation Studies ensured that there was little time available to read for pleasure. So I simply stopped.

In fairness, I did actually enjoy a lot of the books I studied. Subject to deep analysis, the short stories of Franz Kafka reveal themselves to be just about the most perfect use of any language ever. Thomas Mann proved with Mario und der Zauberer just how beautiful German can be in the right hands, while Peter Weiss's Die Ermittlung showcased its brutality in gut-wrenching detail and Ulrich Plenzdorf's Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. its potential for humour. The poetry of Baudelaire allowed me to feel every inch the stereotype of an arts student that I aspired to be, and an academic reading of Asterix revealed more dimensions than my ten-year-old self could ever have imagined.

Then again, a lot of what I read had less of an impact. I am reminded, by its presence on my bookshelf, that I once studied a book named Flugasche by Monika Maron, and yet I cannot recall a single detail of its content. Stripped of its post-colonial context, Maryse Condé's La coeur à rire et à pleurer reads like an airport paperback, while Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthof is Brecht a painfully long way from his best. Renan Demirkan's Schwarzer Tee mit drei Stück Zucker has not even been deemed consequential enough to warrant its own Wikipedia page, and for good reason.

And then there were the works I actively disliked. Nobel Prize aside, Elfriede Jelinek's writing in Women as Lovers is post-modern neo-realist rambling at its absolute worst. The second half of Goethe's Faust proved so impenetrable that I struggled for the majority to decipher even the superficial meaning of the smog of classical allusions and forced weirdness. While I never read Mein Kampf in its entirety, the passages I did encounter, for all their tedious egocentricity, left me wanting to punch a hole in the wall and Hitler in the face. And yet the worst of the worst would have to be Georges Bataille's Le bleu du ciel, the only book I have read so utterly depraved that I found myself genuinely offended by its content. Worse still was that it was dropped from our curriculum. After I had already read it.

Looming in the background to all this like a vast, oceanic undercurrent, was the endless, soulless, hard academic theory. Hours spent poring over regional breakdowns of French by-elections from the 80s in an attempt to work out exactly how many people jumped ship from the Communist Party to aid Mitterrand's drearily efficient rise to power. The inscrutability of political theory in general. The black hole for enjoyment that is film theory in general. The pretension of literary theory in general. The theory of translation, in which the same debate has been raging with little progress since the turn of the 20th century, and which has provided absolutely minimal influence on my emerging career as a translator.

Needless to say, reading came to be something of a chore, and one that I only picked up again when I found myself with a 75-minute daily commute to and from London. This allowed me to tick off a few works I'd had my eye on, but was never a long-term solution and before too long I found myself driving to work, living in a house with plenty of other forms of entertainment in a town with plenty of yet other forms of entertainment.

I did not read many books in 2016. In 2017, I aim to read 20. I will probably review most of them on this page at some point. Stay tuned!