Category: Admin

A short admin post today, to say that I’ve changed the way posts on the blog are indexed. I used to have two pages listing all my reviews, but they became unwieldy. So I’ve been working on a new way of categorising posts, which you can find in a drop-down menu to the right. In particular, you can browse for posts on individual authors, or books translated from particular languages. Hopefully that should make it easier to explore the archives.

Over the years, I’ve found myself becoming interested in more and more different types of fiction – which I’m pleased about, because I can appreciate more; but it does make it more difficult to balance everything. This hasn’t bothered me too much up to now; but I’ve promised that I will read more works in translation, and I want to make that a decisive change in my reading. But there are other aspects of my reading habits that I want to maintain; to make sure it all happens, I’m going to impose a structure on my reading for the first time.

The first part of my plan is that at least two out of every three novels, novellas and story collections that I read in 2014 will either be in translation, or be Anglophone writing from outside an ‘Anglo-American’ default (that phrasing is deliberately woolly, so that I can have some flexibility of interpretation if I want).

The second part of my plan for 2014 is to alternate between male and female authors. My reason for doing this is that most UK-published books in translation are written by men (I’m sure I read somewhere that the gender split is 80/20), and I don’t want my reading to fall into the same pattern.

(Incidentally, I am not going to include non-fiction or anthologies in this structure; where I read those, it’ll be as a separate ‘track’ in my reading. Doing this may unbalance the whole, but shouldn’t do so by too much.)

So that’s how I’m going to read in 2014 (I’ll have a Reading Log page on here to keep track of it all). I think it should enable me to keep the balance I want while shifting my reading in a new direction. I’m looking forward to it, and to sharing what I discover on here.