Making a few reading resolutions for 2023

This time of year, all kinds of resolutions are made by people with the goal of self improvement in mind.

While I try not to follow the crowd too often in this regard, I do feel that setting up some achievable challenges are a good way to start things off towards creating some positive energy to fortify me through the ups and downs of the year there.

So, my first challenge I call “ A Visit with Mrs. Woolf” as in Virginia, whose acquaintance I wish to renew. Over the holidays, a good friend gifted me a 1928 Modern Library edition of Mrs. Dalloway, the most iconic of her works and that seemed like the perfect invitation to a long overdue reread.

However, adding something new to this familiar setting also felt right. To that end, I’m now reading Quentin Bell’s Virginia Woolf : A Biography , which is considered to be a major work in not only chronicling the life of his famous aunt but the artistic social circle she and his mother Vanessa ran with known as the Bloomsbury group.

The first line of this book is “Virginia Woolf was a Miss Stephen”, a simple yet elegant sentence that sounds like something written by the title lady herself. 

The intricate details of the family and friendship connections that Virginia both relied upon and struggled against are keenly described with the proper emotional distance but not in a remotely cold manner. 

Instead, Bell weaves in notes of empathy towards his aunt and other family members who made their mostly unintentional imprints on her life(except for her creepy stepbrother George, that is!). Having such an insider’s look at this influential corner of the British book world is a blessing that Bell doesn’t squander and at this point in the book, does not seem to cloud his literary focus as well. How long that holds up, we shall see.

After this biography, I shall reread my new-to-me copy of Mrs. Dalloway along with a revisit to The Hours by Michael Cunningham. That feels like a pitch perfect renewal of Woolf-ian style there, for sure:

Next, I decided to take a Jane Journey (similar to my Julia Child book journey last year) with a set of nonfiction books matched with classic Jane Austen novels.

My inspiration for this comes from the podcast “The Thing About Austen” , which looks at the small scale history behind such details in her books like just how fancy could toothpick cases be for a character in Sense and Sensibility to place an elaborate order for? ( quite fancy as it turns out-you could even get one in the style of a mermaid necklace!).

Upon checking over my stack of Austen themed books, there were three that I hadn’t gone through yet and now feels like the right time. So, I paired Jane Austen and The Theatre by Paula Byrne with Mansfield Park, of course, and naturally Brian Southam’s Jane Austen and the Navy with Persuasion.

It was tricky, though, to match Irene Collins’ Jane Austen and the Clergy with just one Austen novel. Given the likes of Dr. Grant, Mr.Elton, Edmund Bertram and even Henry Tilney, there are so key church men in her works to make such a simple selection all the more complex!

However, my choice was truly clear as Mr. Collins from Pride and Prejudice cannot be denied his regrettable moments in the sun, as much as he flatters himself most humbly:

Finally, I must attend to Alison Weir, in particular to her Six Tudor Queens series.

By now, I have read them all except for one; Jane Seymour, The Haunted Queen. Frankly, out of the noted wives of Henry the Eighth, it does seem that I’m not alone in hitting the fast forward button when it comes to this middle of the pack princess(and yes, I know she wasn’t a princess, just couldn’t resist the alliteration).

Seymour was wife number three and understandably nervous about her position after seeing what both Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn went through. She was the only one to give birth to a much desired son(which lead to her demise via natural causes) and said to be really beloved by Henry, for what that’s worth!

I do like Weir’s blend of historical research (she is a full fledged historian) and narrative energy which makes this series so appealingly page turning. I also have The Last Tudor Rose by Weir, which may be the start of a War of the Roses series, that I need to get to as well but I definitely want to fully complete her version of Six before the year is out:

This set of reading resolutions should start me off nicely for 2023 and perhaps lead to other bookish goals along the way. 

I have been thinking about a reread of Tom Jones , for example, due to the upcoming new adaptation on Masterpiece PBS this spring. Quite a long haul with that book(my copy actually has cover art from the 1997 miniseries !) but a good read is always worth the time, especially when a great new reason to do so comes along like this: