2023: 12 Months of Reading with The Metropolitanist

Last year I spent a year reading canonical novels by women novelists. This year I’m spending the year reading (or in some cases rereading) novels that are important in Comparative Literature that I have not yet had the chance to read or read with the care and attention with which I wanted to read them.

Today I want to outline what those novels are and invite you all to spend the year reading with me (although, I guess given when I’m posting this, you’ll have to pick up from the second novel). So, here’s the schedule:

January and February: Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann

March and April: The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

May: Death in Venice by Thomas Mann

June and July: Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust

August: Two Women by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda

September and October: Within A Budding Grove by Marcel Proust

November: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

December: The Vagabond by Colette

Actually, looking at the list there’s only three books that will be re-reads for me. Death in Venice, Swann’s Way, and In a Budding Grove. Everything else I’ve read the author, but not the specific novel I picked, so it promises to be a fun year of new reads for me.

I've kicked off 2023 with a Thomas Mann binge. Because I don’t study German literature, and I came out of a program with a much stronger emphasis on French literature, I hadn’t read any of Mann’s longer works. I did read his well known novela “Death in Venice” as a Ph.D. student because I TA’d a class where it was on the syllabus (for undergraduate courses it’s common for professors to pick short works by famous authors to allow students to read more works in a shorter span of time). But, despite the Mann shaped gap in my reading, Thomas Mann is a significant author in the comparative literary tradition, frequently read, so this year—now that I’m no longer pursuing an academic career and have more time to read for non-research reasons—I decided to settle down and do a Mann read. As you can see, I’m reading three of his works in 2023.

Then I’m moving onto a reread. I wanted to restart a full read through of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, but I thought I would spread it out over the next few years, because it’s seven volumes and I didn’t want to spend the entire year solely reading Proust. So I’m re-reading Swann’s Way and In the Budding Grove. I read the first three novels for my comprehensive exams, but comprehensive exam reading requires reading so many books crammed into one year that I didn’t get to do full justice to the volumes that I read. In Search of Lost Time is a series better inhabited than speed-read so I’m looking forward to doing a slow, thoughtful read, and floating in the modernist details of Proust’s prose.

I always have to have a Latin American novel on my list and last year I bought Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Two Women because I hadn’t read it or even heard of it. I wanted to cover Sab last year because it’s the more famous of the two novels and that one is set in Cuba. But I’m excited to read Two Women, which is set in Spain, where Gómez de Avellaneda spent most of her life, and which challenges conventions around marriage and women.

When it comes to reading Virginia Woolf there’s an expectation in Comparative Literature that you’ll read To the Lighthouse because of its place in Erich Auerbach’s work. So, that’s the Woolf I have read. I’ve also read “A Room of One’s Own,” because of my background studying women’s literature. But I have always also wanted to read Orlando and Mrs. Dalloway, so when I happened into a copy of Mrs. Dalloway at work I decided that it would be one of the novels I read this year.

Finally, I decided to close out the year with one of my favorite French novelists, Colette, and one of her novels that I have also not yet read. The Vagabond has been sitting on my shelf, waiting for me to read it, for a while, so I’m excited to finally carve out some time to read it this year and basically with that I think I’ll have read every Colette novel I own. The Vagabond is one of Colette’s noteworthy novels, though really is there a non-noteworthy novel in Colette’s collection? Every Colette novel or novella I get my hands on seems to be famous for some reason or another but The Vagabond captures a very particular time in her life and experiences, so I’m thrilled to finally take a look at that period. The first time I ever read Colette was actually for my comprehensive exams, and only because I had a professor administering my time period exam who demanded I add more women. This complicated my access to the books on my reading list in ways I won’t get into today, but on the bright side I finally started reading Colette, and what a revelation! Though at the time, again, because of the nature of comprehensive exam reading, I didn’t really get the most out of my first experience reading her.

So, that is my year in books. I hope you’ll consider reading along with me! I’ve linked to the versions of each book that I am reading, above, and full disclosure those links will take you to The Metropolitanist Bookshop page (except in the case when the version I was reading wasn’t available on bookshop). If you do purchase them through the bookshop link you will be directly supporting the cost of running this website.

QOTD: Which of the above books are you most excited to either read or see me read?