For those of us who enjoy reading novels but were unable to indulge that pleasure to a large extent during our working lives, retirement provides a great opportunity of catching up with some of the books we wanted to read but didn’t get round to, as well as enjoying the best of contemporary fiction.
The problem can be to know which books are worth reading or which ones you will enjoy. These are, of course, not necessarily the same. You may have your own favourite authors but, unless your list of favourites is substantial, they are unlikely to satisfy your reading needs. You are also going to miss out on a lot of good novels by limiting your reading to writers with whose work you are familiar.
So, how does one go about choosing which books to read? The traditional way is to browse at your local bookshop. A problem with that is that the major booksellers understandably tend to promote their current best sellers, or potential best sellers, to the exclusion of other books. Another way is to look at lists of favourite or “best” novels. An example is the list produced by the BBC at the end of 2003 entitled The Big Read, which you can see on the BBC website. This comprises 200 novels voted for by members of the public. This particular selection is unlikely to be as helpful as you might think as it contains large numbers of pre-twentieth century classics which, I suspect, if you have not already read you are unlikely to want to tackle now, and children’s books, which you are even less likely to want to read. Some outstanding writers of the last 40 years have been sadly overlooked.
Another way of selecting a novel to read is to choose from the winners or nominees of the major fiction prizes such as the Man Booker and the Whitbread. Unfortunately, I have found that this too does not guarantee results. It has surprised me how ordinary some of these books are.
In the hope that you may enjoy reading some of my favourites, I propose to post blogs of recommendations from time to time.
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