I’ve tried all of the classic resolutions at some point, and they’ve all been abject failures. Losing weight. Getting that elusive six pack. Reading the Bible. Writing in the diary every day. Being lucky – a less common choice, but my dad cracks it out every year.
The problem is that they’re about self improvement or, to lose the euphemism, making yourself do something you don’t like. Yuk. But why do they have to be a chore? This year, I’d like to choose a resolution I might actually keep. For a whole year, I resolve to make my reading fun, a source of guilty, guilty pleasure.
I remember as a child I used to read like a cat in a fish factory, devouring everything in sight. But sometime in Upper Sixth I started to get these niggling feelings that I should be reading somebody French in translation, or something in Scottish dialect without punctuation, or any of those books that sit in pairs around the house as both my parents have a copy left over from their English degrees. Reading stopped being fun.
But how I loved books. I think I shall begin by revisiting all my old favourites. Scrap Borges, I’m going to read all of the Just William stories I couldn’t get my hands on as a kid. Then there are all the books I’ve been too snobby to read: Mills and Boon novels, Vampire romances, action novels, celebrity biographies. Perhaps I’ll give Stephenie Meyer a try, or look out those romances by Anne Widdecombe. I’ve heard Katie Price’s autobiographies are startlingly funny.
I’d give that phase about a month. The top of the slippery slope will be the comedic novels of bygone eras: Jane Austin, Graham Greene. I’ll end up giving Catch 22 another go (my fifteen-year-old self didn’t exactly find it hilarious first time around). Slowly, slowly, I’ll slip into more and more varied volumes, and before I know it I’ll have read something terribly serious and not so much as giggled once. But I won’t have broken my resolution, oh no, because I’ll have read it simply because I liked the look of it and the pages kept on turning – because reading it was fun.
I’m not studying English. For me, the only reason to read fiction is for the kicks. If I resolve to stop taking books seriously and go back to basics, perhaps I’ll end up reading Ulysses – and perhaps I’ll enjoy it.
