EVERY year at this time, a book-loving friend gives me a present of Waterstone's elegant, indeed indispensable, Desk Diary. And every year, as soon as I receive it, I perform a simple, and undoubtedly childish, ritual: I enter in one of the blank pages near the back a list of the books I intend to read in the following twelve months.
As with other pious hopes, I never manage to fulfil this one. Looking back on my 1995 diary, I note that I only got round to four books from the planned list of twenty, but as one of them was War and Peace (which I'd been promising to read for decades) I felt rather pleased with myself. I fared little better in 1996, but again my sense of achievement was considerable: I read all (repeat, all) of Montaigne's essays. What's more, I'd advise you to do the same.
Overall, though, the list continues to reproach me. Having devoured Trollope's six Barchester novels in 1994, I put the six Pallisers into the 1995 list, but they remain unread to this day. And in all the lists so far, I've optimistically included Goncharov's Oblomov. Pushkin's The Queen of Spades, Flaubert's Sentimental Education, and Austen's Mansfield Park.
Still, such anal-retentive antics can be useful. If Fathers and Sons hadn't been on the 1994 list, I undoubtedly wouldn't have felt obliged to tackle it and thus wouldn't have ended up reading all of Turgenev, and the same is true of The Age of Innocence, which led me on to The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country and Summer - and to a recognition of Edith Wharton as one of the century's great novelists.
Every year, of course, new books come along that you find yourself reading instead of those you had planned to get stuck into, and some of these turn out to have been well worth your time. In 1996 I'm glad I encountered such notable Irish books as Seamus Heaney's The Spirit Level, Derek Mahon's The Hudson Letter, lta Daly's Unholy Ghosts, Frank Ronan's Handsome Men Are Slightly Sunburnt, Ciaran Folan's Freak Nights, Colm Toibin's The Story of the Night, Conor Cruise O'Brien's On the Eve of the Millennium and Hubert Butler's In the Land of Nod. (And no, nothing links any of them, I'm just happy to have read them).
Meanwhile I've just entered into my Waterstone's Diary a must-read list for 1997, beginning with, yes, Oblomov, The Queen of Spades, Sentimental Education and Mansfield Park. Definitely this year.
ROBERT WELCH, editor of this year's Oxford Companion to and Professor of English in the University of Ulster at Coleraine, has sent me three pamphlets that are well worth your attention.
These are the first in a planned series of pamphlets from the university's Centre for Irish Literature and Bibliography, of which Professor Welch is director. Sean Mac Reamoinn wears his considerable knowledge lightly in Our Final Sign, which celebrates the Irish language and its literature; in Strangers, Patrick Walsh reflects on a correspondence between Daniel Corkery and John Hewitt; and Patrick Maume writes provocatively of the relationship between Corkery and D.P. Moran (editor of the Dublin weekly, The Leader) in The Rise and Fall of Irish Ireland.
GERARD LYNE of the National Library alerts me to a fascinating and elegantly produced book that's just been issued by the Rare Books Group of the Library Association of Ireland.
Edited by his colleague Gerry Long, it's called Books Beyond the Pale and is subtitled "Aspects of the Provincial Book Trade in Ireland Before 1850". Resulting from a seminar held by the group in 1994, it addresses a variety of topics, including the Catholic press in Munster in the 18th century, the early book trades in Galway, book distribution in Belfast, and the United Irishmen's widely distributed radical newspapers and pamphlets in the 1790s.
The declared aim of the book is to increase our understanding of the role played by authors, printers, publishers and book-sellers in the social and intellectual life of an earlier Ireland, and this it achieves with scholarship and style.