A Year in Reading: Hermione Hoby

I write down each one in black biro in a white notebook and when I count up the titles at the end of the year, the number is always too low. Here I am then, repenting of minutes spent slack-gazed at Instagram, or hours squandered watching ’90s British sitcom and early Richard Curtis venture The Vicar of Dibley. (The vicar’s got knockers, is the central joke. In my defense, I had flu.) When, at the end of that sick week in August, I’d scraped iPlayer’s barrel for its last dredge of Dawn French in a cassock, Mary Oliver pulled up a chair in the corner of the room of my mind, crossed her arms and said, huh, so this is what you did with your one wild and precious life. I’m a little disappointed in me, too, Mary. But Mary, I also read some books.

I closed out the year with kick. I haven’t read him since I was a teenager, i.e. not yet a woman, certainly not a Woman in Love. How wonderful to re-encounter Ursula and Gudrun—especially Gudrun, ah, Gudrun in your smashing tights making your weird little serious woodcuts—as an equal. Or so I flattered myself; I don’t dress as well (my tights, neither silken nor emerald, are cheap, black, and have holes in the toes) but I delighted in our shared anti-natalist sentiments and auto-Anglophobia. I really think we’d be great pals, me and the Brangwen gals. I’m working on a third novel, hopelessly striving to build the kind of intelligent architecture that makes possible accretive narrative meaning, and reading I realized, mildly scandalized, that there’s a modular quality to the book: discounting the last 50 pages or so, you could basically rearrange chapters however you liked and the thing would have the same psychological intensity. An uncharitable way of putting this would be that one of the best novels of the 20th century is less than the sum of its parts. Speaking of love (always!) I finally read ’s enduring and rightly beloved . May we all be and .