Ancillary Sword & Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

Over the last year I’ve been reading books written by women and whilst I have made efforts to read both fiction and non-fiction, and to read books written by women writing in English as their first language and books in translation, I haven’t made a great deal of effort to read across genres. A recent internet argument brought it home to me that it is truly very difficult to read without inherent prejudice; there are so many books out there that whatever your selection method, there will be some preference which dictates the majority of your choices. Accepting that it is not possible to be truly universal in my reading, however much I would like to be, I do think that I ought to read as widely as possible in order to confront and challenge my prejudices, and also to offer myself the opportunity to find something new that I loved. It was in this spirit that I tracked down the Ancillary books by Ann Leckie.

The Ancillary books are science fiction, not my usual genre but one I have some experience with (being married to a sci-fi boffin being an obvious influence here). It is a genre which has, I think, a difficult relationship with women. There are some notable names in science fiction including Ursula K LeGuin (who I’m getting around to) and Doris Lessing who famously said that her science fiction was the work she was the most proud of. Yet as a genre it is dominated by men: both as producers and readers. I’m sure there are a host of social reasons lying behind this, none of which I will solve by means of this blog. What I can do, however, is read some science fiction written by women and I’m resolving to do more of this going forward. As a reader I enjoy science fiction, so when I happened across an article about this Nebula award winning book (the first book, Ancillary Justice) written by a woman, and found that they had it in my library (erroneously logged as ‘fantasy’) it felt like fate that I had to read it. And when I inadvertently reserved the second book (Ancillary Sword) first, it felt like fate that I had to read that too (there are three books but the third, Ancillary Mercy, is still in the course of being written).

Long story concluded. As I read both books, this review will cover both of them. So what are the Ancillary books about? This series is set in the Radch Empire, a race of humans called the Radchaai (literally: civilised) who are an imperialistic race who colonise (annexe) other planets using militaristic means. They are extremely successful at annexation due to technological superiority and a kind of ideological purity which is a little bit disturbing. Consequently most planets will surrender immediately once the Radchaai arrive. When a planet is annexed the Radchaai employ ships with artificial intelligence that use ‘ancillaries’ – human corpses whose intelligence is supplanted by that of the ship – which can act as its eyes and ears on the ground, be in multiple places at one time and carry out actions on the ship’s behalf. There are three key types of Radchaai ship: Swords which are used for offensive purposes; Justices which enforce post annexation law and order; and Mercies which are used for humanitarian purposes. The ships must follow the orders of their Radchaai crew, and their ancillaries are used to service the crew’s needs and requirements. However, the ultimate authority is Anaander Mianaai, ancient leader of the Radch. One other thing to know about the Radch is that they are genderless, consequently a Radchaai will refer to all others as female, and often has difficulty in distinguishing between genders when encountering a gendered race.

The story opens with the character of Breq, finding a body in the snow. The body turns out to be a Radch officer, Seivardan who had been believed to be killed two thousand years earlier when her ship the Sword of Nathtas was destroyed. Breq, a mere 21 years old, knows who Sevardan is because Breq is not who she appears to be. What she is is an ancillary, Justice of Toren One Esk the remaining intelligence of the ship Justice of Toren which was also destroyed in an incident following the annexation of the planet Ors. Perhaps that’s why Breq saves Seivardan, that they are both the sole remaining memory of their ship, though in the case of Breq she is the ship. This is something I found incredibly hard to get my head around.

Breq rescues Seivardan, discovering that Seivardan is addicted to a substance called kef which she has to help wean her off. Seivardan appears a reluctant rescuee, and there is a continued sense that Breq herself doesn’t quite know why she has rescued Seivardan. Neither is she honest with Seivardan about who and what she is. This delay and necessary subterfuge interferes with her plans which we soon learn are to destroy Anaander Mianaai, leader of the Radchaai, as she holds Mianaai responsible for the destruction of Justice of Toren. She is searching for a weapon that is invisible to Radch detection technology and was used by a race called the Garseddai to destroy one of the Radchaai ships. The result of the Garseddai’s assault was the destruction of their whole civilisation, an event which is pivotal to the events in this book.

The early part of the story skips between past and present, opening up the back story that led the Justice of Toren being trapped in a single body and hell bent on destroying the Lord of the Radch. What we learn is that something strange was going on in the annexation of the Ors and that somehow Anaander Mianaai is involved. This subterfuge results in the Justice of Toren being forced to kill her favourite Lieutenant, Lieutenant Awn. The result of this action was that the Justice of Toren turned her gun on the Lord of the Radch, killing her. This was something she shouldn’t have been able to do.

Confused yet? I’m sure you’re not alone. Leckie creates an incredibly complex universe, one which covers several races, several different types of social structure, different Gods, different languages, different technologies. An incredible amount of groundwork goes into the first book to establish the ground rules from which the story then flows. Consequently I found the book a little slow to get going, but I think this is necessary so that the rest of the story makes sense. It’s also worth bearing in mind that this is a trilogy, so the writer has a much larger canvas to work with than just the first book itself. That being said, I think Leckie does a great job of introducing the back story, establishing the universe in which the story operates, and creates something which is highly believable and consistent to itself. She also does a great job of introducing us to the characters; I grew quite fond of Lieutenant Awn, found Seivardan frustrating and Breq herself single minded (ha!) and deceptive.

There is, as is always the case, something unsettlingly familiar about the world that Leckie creates. Though it is alien, it is not completely unrecognisable. In the second book Breq is given her own ship, the Mercy of Kalr, which knows that Breq is an ancillary. They travel to a distant planet where the sister of Lieutenant Awn lives. Breq cannot tell the sister who she is, and to everyone not in the know she merely appears to be a, somewhat untypical, Radchaai Fleet Captain.  The planet around which the Radch station (another AI) orbits is used for tea production; the Radchaai have a real love of tea, it forms a basis for many of their social interactions. I think this was the point when I started to think about the Radchaai as the British Empire in space. There were many overlaps: the love of tea, the brutal colonisations based on technological superiority, the belief that they were bringing ‘civilisation’ to the people being colonised, the complex administrative structures they built to maintain control, the exploitation of the lands and people that they’d conquered. This aside, the second book is more intimate than the first. We learn more about Breq, less about Seivardan who seems to disappear into the background (a surprising move for such a key character), the story moves into the territory of strategy and intrigue, class warfare and exploitation of an ‘underclass’, created, of course, by those who hold influence and power.  

Ancillary Justice, and later Ancillary Sword, fulfil all those things that are great about science fiction. By this I mean that the unfamiliar setting is used to explore more familiar human moral issues and ask us to confront them with a degree of personal distance. Leckie covers a lot of issues in these two books including imperialism, the question of ‘I was just following orders’, gender, racism, class. She asks us to confront what it means to be ‘human’ – if we do not have gender, are we human? If we have consciousness but are technologically based, are we human? Breq seems a very human character, yet Leckie is very clear that she is not and towards the end of the first book you are forced to question how much of Breq’s actions are of her own making and how much is programming? Is Breq really as ‘human’ as she seems, or is she still a tool of the Lord of the Radch? It is a question that, as at the end of the second book, I am still not sure about.

I read both Ancillary Justice and Ancillary Sword at breakneck speed. It’s a long time since I finished two books in four days, but that’s how engaging these stories are. It is complicated; I cannot begin to untangle the complexities in this short blog entry. It is vivid and realistic and it is extraordinarily true to itself. Alongside that is an engaging story, complex moral conundrums and a depth which leaves you a lot to think about afterwards. That’s what truly great science fiction does, and this is truly great science fiction. I’m very much looking forward to reading the third.

Ancillary Justice and Ancillary Sword receive an intrigued 8 out of 10 Biis.

Great books for kids: Moominland Midwinter by Tove Jansson

“And so Moomintroll was helplessly thrown out in a strange and dangerous world and dropped up to his ears in the first snowdrift of his experience. It felt unpleasantly prickly to his velvet skin, but at the same time his snout caught a new smell. It was a more serious smell than any he had felt before, and slightly frightening. But it made him wide awake and greatly interested.”

Moominland Midwinter is the story of the winter in which, unusually, Moomintroll wakes too early from his winter hibernation and so is thrust into a terrifying yet exciting new world. For no Moomin before has experienced winter.

If you haven’t experienced the Moomintrolls, let me explain a little about them. These are the creation of Tove Jansson (who you may be aware that I love, possibly), a family of hippo-like creatures and their extended friends and family. I was unfortunate not to experience the Moomins as a child, as all the Moomin books are magical reads. They are gentle and endearing, yet never once do they patronise and it is, perhaps, this quality which has resulted in those often-seen spin-offs like Moomintroll’s Book ofThoughts

In Moominland Midwinter, Moomintroll decides to strike out on his own having awakened early from his winter hibernation. Consequently he is thrust into a strange and uncertain land, filled with unusual creatures and scary encounters. This is the classic ‘coming of age’ story in which the protagonist must embark on some adventure of their own, to be challenged and found wanting, to rely on their own skills and capabilities, in order to discover themselves. In the beginning Moomintroll finds winter incredibly frustrating. He is angry, angry at himself for being awake, angry at the strangeness of the world, angry at the loneliness, the isolation, angry at the absent sun. He is unsettled by a world that doesn’t make sense to him. As he describes here:

“’Sing all you want,’ Moomintroll muttered, angry to the point of crying. ‘Sing about your horrible winter with the black ice and unfriendly snow-horses, and people who never appear but only hide and are queer!’

He tramped up the slope, he kicked at the snow, his tears froze on his snout, and suddenly he started to sing his own song.

He sang it at the top of his voice, so that Too-ticky would hear it and be put out.

This was Moomintroll’s angry summer song:

Listen, winter creatures, who have sneaked the sun away,

Who are hiding in the dark and making all the valley grey:

I am utterly alone, and I’m tired to the bone,

And I’m sick enough of snowdrifts just to lay me down and groan.

I want my blue verandah and the glitter of the sea

And I tell you one and all that your winter’s not for me!

‘Just you wait until my sun’s coming back to look at you, and then you’ll all look silly, all of you,’ Moomintroll shouted and didn’t even care about his rhymes anymore…”

Though Moomintroll wakes without his family, he is not alone. He is surrounded, instead, by a fascinating cast of characters like the wise and matter-of-fact Too-ticky, who is used to great effect here in helping Moomintroll come to terms with winter, without sentimentality. Too-ticky has the best lines, the greatest aplomb in the whole book and it is always wonderful when Too-ticky appears. Like here, as Too-ticky watches Moomintroll carry out a daring rescue:

“Too-ticky stood looking on for a while, and then she went inside the bathing-house and put a kettle of water on the stove. ‘Quite, quite,’ she thought with a little sigh. ‘It’s always like this in their adventures. To save and be saved. I wish somebody would write a story sometime about the people who warm up the heroes afterwards.’

Or here as Too-ticky explains about snow:

“’Tell me about the snow,’ Moomintroll said and seated himself in Moominpappa’s sun-bleached garden chair. ‘I don’t understand it.’

‘I don’t either,’ said Too-ticky. ‘You believe it’s cold, but if you build yourself a snowhouse it’s warm. You think it’s white, but at times it looks pink, and another time it’s blue. It can be softer than anything, and then again harder than stone. Nothing is certain.’”

Nothing is certain is classic Moomintroll wisdom. Truths delivered without window dressing, without dumbing it down. It is the matter-of-factness about Moomin stories which is often so enticing, endearing.

Along with Too-ticky, Little My (who I think is my favourite) is an unexpected companion for Moomintroll, also waking unexpectedly for winter. Little My is awesome! She is fearless, devilish, she does exactly what she wants exactly as she wants to. Unlike Moomintroll who struggles to accommodate winter’s strangeness into his comforting summer world, Little My confronts it, teeth bared, eking every new experience out of it that she can. Like here as she wakes from her winter sleep:

“Little My gave a snort and climbed out of the cardboard box. She closed the lid on her sister, who was still asleep, and went over and felt the snow with her paw.

‘So this is what it’s like,’ she said. ‘Funny ideas people get.’ She squeezed a snowball and hit the squirrel on the head with her first throw. And then Little My stepped out from the cave to take possession of winter.

The first thing she accomplished was to slip on the icy cliff and sit down very hard.

‘I see,’ Little My said in a threatening voice. ‘They think they’ll get away with anything.’

Then she happened to think of what a My looks like with her legs in the air, and she chuckled to herself for quite a while. She inspected the cliff and the hillside and thought a bit. Then she said: ‘Well now,’ and did a jumpy switchback slide far out on the smooth ice.

She repeated this six times more and noticed that it made her tummy cold.

Little My went back into the cave and turned her sleeping sister out of the cardboard box. My had never seen a toboggan, but she had a definite feeling there were many sensible ways of using a cardboard box.”

Winter is not all Little My takes possession of! 

Nothing very much happens in Moominland Midwinter. The threats aren’t really very threatening and the adventures nothing striking either. There is, however, a sense of Moomintroll entering a world that is strange and different, confronting a form of life of which he has no experience and in which he doesn’t belong. Through the darkness and cold of winter, Jansson shows us a child entering the adult world, facing the difficulties and responsibilities, confronting change and finding it emotionally difficult. It is a gentle and yet extraordinarily honest story, heaped with wisdom and unvarnished truth. In the end, Moomintroll makes winter his own, just as a child enters the adult world, through ordinary adversity and the aid of good, and wise friends.

Moomintroll Midwinter, along with all the Moomin books, is a fabulous read for children. Good for the independent reader, perhaps 8 years and older, or good for a bedtime story over several nights for the younger listener. And great for parents too, who may appreciate some of the complexities being explored through these delightful, soulful creatures.

A Commitment to #TBR20

I mentioned #TBR20 in my 2015 Reading Ambitions blog, and since then the movement (started by blogger Eva Stalker) has been gaining steam and national attention, including multiple references on the Guardian website. Eva has compiled an excellent list of all the people taking part which includes pictures of people’s TBR piles which is worth a view here 

For myself, I had planned to pick my TBRs as I went along, I certainly have a large enough selection to choose from (I could probably choose a TBR100 without much effort). I started my initiative in December, and so far I’ve already read 10 of my TBR20. This has led to a number of soul-searching thoughts including ‘am I cheating?’, ‘am I making this too easy on myself?’, ‘am I really committed?’ and being honest I have to say that there may have been a slight degree of making the challenge easy (the selection  of a Moomins book condemns me, I think). So in typical me fashion I think that maybe I need to make this more of a challenge. I am pretty desperate to buy a book right now. There’s one particular book I really, really want to own (not just read, own (aka ‘covet’) ) which is this one. I have some book tokens burning a hole in my pocket, I have Waterstone's points and am one stamp off a £10 voucher. I have the means to buy a book, I have the desire (when don’t I?), but I also have this commitment to try to slow my buying speed and I think it would do me the power of good to break my habit of impulse book buying. It would certainly do some good for my bulging shelves and my empty bank balance. So in the true spirit of New Year in which we self punish for the excesses of Christmas, I am going to make my challenge a little bit harder. Here is my challenge:

I’m going to select the final 10 of my #TBR20 list.

Yes, I admit, it doesn’t sound too groundbreaking, but there’s a sting in the tail. You see, I find it very difficult to stick to a reading list and I’m one of those readers who slips from book to book through a curiosity algorithm that would defy the most advanced mathematician. Since I’ve committed to reading Virginia Woolf, I have largely managed to stick to the plan but I have had breaks to read other books (How to be Both, Lila, the Ancillary series) so haven’t stuck to the plan entirely rigidly. So my deal with myself is this: I will select the last 10 of my TBR list and whilst I am permitted to read other books, books from my collection or books from the library, I am forbidden from buying  another book until I have finished those 10. That means I can have read 20 or even 30 books that I already own or have loaned, but until all those chosen titles have been read the book token stays in my pocket. My reward for successful completion of this project is the purchase of that lovely Tove Jansson biography (and maybe Hermione Lee’s book about Virginia Woolf). I think that cuts a fair deal.

So onto the selection. Again, not making to want it too easy on myself (I have whizzed through my first 10 at breakneck speed thanks, in part, to a Christmas break during which we had no phone or broadband connection courtesy of some clumsy-fingered BT engineer), I have tried to select a challenging array of books to comprise my last ten. Here is my selection.

To explain: the pile on the left represents the books I’ve already read (missing Lila, which I had to return to the library). In my ‘to read’ pile, each of the books falls into one or more of the following categories:

1. It’s a Virginia Woolf book – my commitment to finish reading all of Virginia Woolf’s fiction continues and these final two may comprise, bizarrely, the most ‘easy’ of my choices.

2. It’s a book that a friend bought for me and I haven’t yet got around to reading it – because guilt. This would include the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks which looks like exactly my kind of book, but it’s quite long and daunting and sciency so I keep putting it off. Which leads to category 3.

3. It’s a book I’ve been avoiding for one reason or another. This explains most of the pile. All of those books are books that I have desired to read and have then put off reading because: 1) they’re long, 2) they’re complex, 3) I was in the ‘wrong frame of mind’, 4) they were written by a man. So it’s about time I got around to them. They’ve been hanging around in my collection so long, their characters may have aged or died.

4. It’s a book I bought for a bizarre reason – like Caramelo, which I bought because the cover is so strangely awful (yet compelling) I had to have it in my collection (true fact).

5. My daughter chose it – excited by my prowling around the library, my daughter asked if she could pick a book to add to the pile, then she picked 2. This explains why my TBR10 is actually 11.

I think this is a challenge I can do (I am trying to expunge from my memory the failure iro Proust). Perhaps with a little help from my co-TBRers, it’ll keep me honest and on the path to success. Wish me luck!

In case you can't read the titles the books are:
Read pile: The Waves (Virginia Woolf), Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal (Jeanette Winterson), Ancillary Justice (Ann Leckie), Ancillary Sword (Ann Leckie), Good Morning, Midnight (Jean Rhys), The Years (Virginia Woolf), A Field Guide to Getting Lost (Rebecca Solnit), Moominland Midwinter (Tove Jansson), Full Tilt (Dervla Murphy)
To Read pile: The Ramayana (unknown, but probably a bloke), Gone Girl (Gillian Flynn), Caramelo (Sandra Cisneros), Americanah (the excellent Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie), School for Love (Oivia Manning), Behindlings (Nicola Barker), The Mill on the Floss (George Eliot), The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Rebecca Skloot), The Bone Clocks (David Mitchell), Between the Acts (Virginia Woolf), Flush (Virginia Woolf). 

Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal by Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson is a writer who openly plumbs her own history in her work, famously so in her debut novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit which chronicles her childhood as an adoptive daughter, living in the house of a woman obsessed with the apocalypse and highly homophobic, which is unfortunate for Winterson who is a lesbian. I haven’t read Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, though it is a book which has been sitting on my shelf for some time, and having read Why Be Happy… I think it’s about time I got around to it.

Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal is a memoir, a non-fictionalised account of the same events but also spanning a greater period of Winterson’s life. The memoir focuses on three significant events: her adoptive childhood and her relationship with Mrs Winterson, her emotional breakdown following the death of her mother and the end of a long-term relationship, and the search for her birth mother. Interspersed amongst these events are many fascinating observations about education, about reading, about feminism, about her love of women and women she has loved, about love, sharings of wisdom and history to name but a few. It is a difficult book to explain because of this, so perhaps I can explain by saying that whenever I read a book I mark pages of interest with a little torn strip of paper, so I can return to it and write about it or reflect on it. My copy of Why Be Happy is bursting at the seams with these little strips of paper. There is much wisdom in this book, much honestly and reflection.

Jeanette Winterson is a writer who is honest and open, she writes with passion and risk, she is funny, bright and insightful. It is, whether you know her story or not, an insightful and informative read. And it’s fun to read too. There were many points in the reading that I laughed openly, other times when I felt close to tears. Winterson is a writer who pulls emotion close to the surface, but she’s not sentimental or crass. She writes an incredible amount about love; I have seen this in her fiction, most especially in The Powerbook which is, perhaps, one of the most passionate books I have ever read. It is therefore surprising that Winterson spends much of the book convincing the reader that she doesn’t know how to love, that she learned to do it wrong. As she explains here:

“No. And all my life I have repeated patterns of rejection. My success with books felt like gatecrashing. When critics and the press turned on me, I roared back in rage, and no, I didn’t believe the things they said about me or my work, because my writing has always stayed clear and luminous to me, uncontaminated, but I did know that I wasn’t wanted.

And I have loved most extravagantly where my love could not be returned in any sane and stead way – the triangles of marriages and complex affiliations. I have failed to love well where I might have done, and I have stayed in relationships too long because I did not want to be a quitter who did not know how to love.

But I did not know how to love. If I could have faced that simple fact about myself, and the likelihood that someone with my story (my stories, both real and invented) would have big problems with love, then, then, what?

Listen, we are human beings. Listen, we are inclined to love. Love is there, but we need to be taught how. We want to stand upright, we want to walk, but someone needs to hold our hand and balance us a bit, and scoop us up when we fall.

Listen, we fall. Love is there but we have to learn it – and its shapes and its possibilities. I taught myself to stand on my own two feet, but I could not teach myself how to love.

We have a capacity for language. We have a capacity for love. We need other people to release those capacities.

In my work I found a way to talk about love – and that was real. I had not found a way to love. That was changing.”

Jeanette Winterson is an intelligent and vibrant woman, she is a fighter and she fights through her fiction, she reaches and explores searching out what she wants and needs to survive, but more than to survive: to live. Coming from a working class background in the North of England (not hugely different to my own, though my mother was mine and more stable) she scrabbled and fought her way out of an appalling family situation into a degree course at Oxford (no mean feat) into a published, award winning novelist by the age of 25. She touches on all of this throughout Why Be Happy, and she does this not by being modest or with hubris but with that luminous clarity she describes about her connection with language. Whilst love may have failed her, language hasn’t and her relationship with reading, how she explored and learned from it, its intrinsic value, is inspiring. Another aspect of the book I particularly loved was the way it dipped and dove around in time. This is a feature of Winterson’s books (it has certainly appeared in all the others I’ve read) and it is one that could be frustrating but which I find very personable. Particularly in the memoir form, you get the sense that you’re following the train of Winterson’s mind where she leads you, that one thought leads to another and then to another. It places Winterson very present in the book, it is like she is talking to you. A conversation I think I would find terrifying and fascinating in equal measure.

I came away from Why Be Happy with a huge respect for Winterson as a writer. It is an honest, heartfelt and intelligent book. There are so many fonts of wisdom it is impossible to write about them all here. I was a fan before, and I’m more of a fan now. She is a writer not afraid of taking a risk, she is herself and unashamed of it. She has suffered, she has lost, she has used her life and her loss and her pain and her endless search for love as a mine for her fiction and it is remarkable for it. This non-fictional account is no different. What a great book, and a great woman.

Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal receives a respectful 10 out of 10 Biis. 

Reading Ambitions: 2015

I don’t plan on looking back at my reading year for 2014. It’s something that I used to do, it’s fun to do, but after my list making habit began to border on the edge of insanity I stopped keeping a book list entirely, and besides most of the books I’ve read have been reviewed on the blog already so I would prefer to encourage readers to dig around in the blog instead. Sanity thus protected, I thought it would be good, instead, to set out some reading goals for 2015.

Goals is the wrong word, of course. Goals and reading are not concepts that really fit together in my mind, though perhaps if I was a schoolteacher I might have a different perception on that. Perhaps, then, it is better to say some loose guidelines around the kind of reading I’d quite like to do in 2015. Or beyond. I’m not big on this whole living year by year concept either. Yet here I am writing about the next block of 364 days like a trooper. Did I say my sanity had been protected?

One of the great reading decisions I made in 2014, not that I’m reflecting on it of course, was to try to read books written by female writers. I didn’t set out to make this an iron-clad rule but in the end, barring half of Don DeLillo’s Underworld (which I quit because, unbelievably, I was finding it a bit boring/repetitive. This shocked me a great deal), I did end up reading only books written by women. This was surprising, as I thought I’d cave at some point and read, perhaps, the new David Mitchell, or perhaps something by Ballard or Nicholson Baker. Yet that didn’t happen. That wasn’t because I exercised an iron will to keep picking books written by women, neither was it because of dogged stubbornness or determination to hit a target. I didn’t have to keep convincing myself. It was easy. That’s because there are a huge number of amazing writers out there who also happen to have two X chromosomes and I was lucky to have encountered a bunch of brilliant bloggers who have been sharing their thoughts on great writers they’ve read who also happen to have two X chromosomes. The pool was rich with writing brilliance. Consequently I have read some amazing new (to me) contemporary writers (Evie Wyld, Hannah Kent, Elena Ferrante, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Kathleen Jamie, Helen McDonald, Annie Dillard); reminded myself of some more familiar, great contemporary writers (Ali Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, Yoko Ogawa, Helen DeWitt); explored in more depth some classic (or should be classic) female greats (Virginia Woolf, Tove Jansson). Not that I’m reflecting on 2014 at all.

I don’t plan to exclusively read female writers, but I think after having experimented and explored for the last year I’ve discovered an appetite to experiment and explore some more. In the course of reading around different female writers I have, inevitably, encountered others that I’d like to read that I simply haven’t had time to. The following are writers I’d like to read (either for the first time, or in more depth) in the not-too-distant future:

Joan Didion – I have Katie Roiphe to thank for that one.

Edna O’Brien – because I bought the Country Girls trilogy from the secondhand bookshop and I’m itching to read them.

George Eliot – because she is greater than just Middlemarch and my collection of Eliot books is growing.

Rebecca Solnit – 2 books in my collection, none read yet. Yet I’ve encountered her writing elsewhere and she’s always impressed me as an intelligent, insightful woman.

Elena Ferrante – because the 3 books of the Neopolitan series are watching me…watching me I say!

Carol Shields – because she’s been recommended to me by too many people, there must be something in it.

Jane Gardam – for the same reason (also her Old Filth trilogy has just been reissued, quite beautifully)

I also want to go back to reading Japanese writers more regularly. I’ve committed to joining in with January in Japan, as promoted here in Tony Reading List  which will see me reading my first book by a male writer in a year, though Kawabata is surely an artist worth making the break for. I have a particular love for Japanese writers, there is something about Japanese fiction which really resonates with me. There is a well established catalogue of male Japanese writers that I’m already familiar with, so I’d like to explore the female writers in more depth. Writers who have made my ‘to read’ list so far include: Minae Mizumura (A True Novel, recommended from more than one source); Fumiko Enchi, because The Waiting Years was amazing; Yoko Ogawa, because everything I’ve read that she’s written has been amazing in quite different ways; and some writers that are completely new to me including Masako Togawa, Yoko Tawada, Morio Kito and Mitsuyo Kakuto. My aim is to try to read one per month, but I’ll see how that works out.  

I’d like to read more translated fiction in general. I’m not sure how I’ll fit that in, but I’ll find a way. Of course Ferrante will be in translation, as will the Japanese fiction (though I’m working on my Japanese reading skills…one day) so perhaps it will be easier than I think. There’s also one other commitment which I haven’t yet mentioned, which is my #TBR20 commitment over on Twitter. The idea behind this (if you’re not already familiar) is that it’s a commitment to read 20 books you already own, before buying (or borrowing) any more. I will have to break this to read the Kawabata (which I’ll loan from the library) but otherwise I’d like to stick to this commitment which may help me get through January with cash still in the bank. I haven’t made a list, I don’t want to be too prescriptive about which 20 books I read, and I have read 8 already (though I may have slightly cheated by including a children’s book in there) but there’s an opportunity to dig out some of my books in translation I haven’t yet got around to and kill two birds with one stone. And when I’ve finished, I will feel extremely virtuous. Then again, there is this amazing biography of Tove Jansson’s work which is tempting me and I do have some book tokens just burning to be used…

One thing I don’t want to do in 2015 is read more. My reading is lightweight compared to some (I’ve seen listings in excess of 150 books per year, whereas I generally average between 60 – 80, not that I’m counting (I’m really not)), but it is enough. I think if I try to read more I’m only going to absorb less. One of the things I’ve enjoyed about reading Woolf (which I haven’t quite finished) is how much richer the experience is when I’m forced to delve deeply, to take my time. I am enjoying re-reading favourite novels, or taking my time over difficult, but rewarding, books. I don’t know if this is an age thing, or just a realisation that I cannot read everything so I should make sure that what I do read is fulfilling to me. It is not quantity, but quality that matters. I’ve been lucky to have encountered a lot of fulfilling books recently, and I’ve no desire to give that up.

Aside from these (ambitious) goals, I’d like to continue reading non-fiction books. I’ve enjoyed the many I’ve read in the last 12 months, and I have a shelf-full of others that I really need to work my way around to.

Wishing you all another great year of reading pleasure.