Veganuary: A Retrospective

From 00.00 on the 1st of January to 00.00 on the 1st of February, I attempted to be vegan.

There are three instances in which I believe I may have eaten something that came from an animal, which I will list here:

 - I ate a spoonful of some tomato soup which looked clear (and thus milk/cream-free) but, upon tasting, might have contained dairy. I did not eat the rest of the soup.

 - I ate three black olives which may have been contaminated with tzatziki. I did this because a) it was not clear whether or not they had been and b) I have no self-control when it comes to olives.

 - I ate a crisp which turned out to have "cheddar" in the name. My excuses for this are that it was 8pm, I'd been drinking heavily and I hadn't eaten anything that day.

These transgressions aren't groundbreakingly interesting, but they do illustrate my general attitude to the whole thing: I was as cautious as it was possible to be within reason, and thought a hell of a lot more about what I ate than I usually do, but I wasn't prepared to beat myself up over a mouthful of soup or three olives or whatever.

As an experiment, it was interesting. I did not experience the utter, blissful absence of disease, malaise and ill-feeling which the more vocal of the veganazis promise (I guess that's because I haven't given it long enough for all of those pernicious dairy-based toxins to leave my system, right?), but then, neither did I expect to. I wasn't at all ill in the last month, although that's not a great indicator of dietary benefit; I have a pretty tough immune system, and it would be normal in any given month for me to have been healthy throughout. Without going into detail, my digestion was different but no worse or better than usual. I was a little hungrier than usual in spite of eating a decent quantity of food. 

In terms of negative health effects, it's hard to say - so many variables act on the human body on a daily basis that it's impossible to point to anything that I experienced this month and think, "yep, that was definitely a result of veganism." I had some minor sleep and mood disturbances in the first half of the month - very minor - and it doesn't seem likely that these correlate to cheese (it was also January, which suggests itself as a stronger correlative). My skin was a little drier than usual, but that could be atmospheric, or based on spending Christmas in a soft water area and then coming back to a hard water area.

It would have been interesting to have had some kind of blood work done immediately before and immediately after the month, but it seemed impractical to do so. I gave blood during the month and didn't show any signs of anaemia; the donation went well.

I felt pretty good, but I felt pretty good in November and December, too.

I cooked some interesting stuff that I probably wouldn't have made before, as well as some modified versions of old favourites, and in general used more fresh ingredients and spent longer cooking. Houmous became a catch-all savoury dairy replacement. Burritos with cheese and sour cream became burritos with houmous. The cheese-blanket which had of late covered most of my self-cooked meals was generally replaced with a dollop of houmous. It satisfies something creamy and salty and primordial. The lazy dinner option became straight carbs rather than carbs-with-cheese; I don't think this is much healthier objectively, but it might be. I feel much happier cooking with fresh tofu than I did before, which is awesome. I'd always wanted the knack. Lunch at work was nowhere near as boring as I'd feared - with some vegetable-and-salad wizardry and a lot of sweet chilli dressing, I made interesting and delicious lunches every day. My fruit and vegetable consumption - previously already reasonable - skyrocketed.

On the ethics front, it was a reflective period. I'd been vaguely troubled by certain aspects of commercial dairy farming, and was wondering if this month would push me into the "I definitely want to be vegan full-time" category.

The short answer is, "it didn't."

Veganism, to me, is much more of a grey area than vegetarianism. Vegetarianism is easier to make black and white, even if people have a tendency to take the term and do as they will with it (I'm looking at the pescetarians who don't call themselves that here). As a vegetarian, I did not and do not eat anything which was ever alive in an animal sense. Even fish, whose plight and murder does not inspire any immediate visceral feelings in me. Even tasty, tasty bivalves. Now, there were still some ethical quandries inherent in this lifestyle - I believe, for example, that nothing living should have to die so that I can eat it. But I kill insects with something akin to insecticidal glee, simply because I hate bugs and find them weird and gross, and don't want them all up in my personal space. And then there are the lesser-or-greater degrees, like gelatine (I tend to avoid it but am not as troubled if I find I've eaten it by accident than I would be if I'd accidentally eaten meat) or isinglass used in the production of booze.

Veganism is even less clear-cut. On the surface, the simple, "no dairy or eggs" doesn't sound like an ethical problem area. But most of the vegans I know do it to different degrees, or have different exceptions. Some will eat honey, because bee-keeping might actually be helping the bees. Some have no problem buying woollen products (just like some vegetarians will buy leather), others will drink regular wine and beer, or will drink or eat something that they don't know isn't vegan until they find out that it is, or will make exceptions for things which are advertised as containing trace amounts of something non-vegan. 

In terms of strictness, it goes much deeper than this. I delved into the world of vegan bloggers, and found those who are strictly raw, and people who won't eat tofu or soy products because they disagree with the way soy is farmed, or who will only eat certain types of sugar - all kinds of other distinctions beyond the simple "I don't eat eggs or dairy" which marks where the popular conception of veganism begins and ends.

The thing that really troubled me about this blog scene (and there were a lot of things which troubled me) was that each more stringent definition seemed to be pursued in an attempt either a) to detoxify the human body entirely from what seem to be mostly imagined 'toxins' and/or b) to be the most virtuous person who ever lived. 

I don't know what it is about food that makes people attach emotion to it. It's something which I try to avoid doing, and it gently angers me every time I overhear someone at lunch talking about "good" or "bad" or "naughty" (that one really gets me) food. Food has no inherent emotional load or value. There isn't an objective scale, with deep-fried dime bar cake at one end and iceberg lettuce at the other, which demonstrates the value of food. It's food. Take it for all in all. Even if all of the pie slices are bright red on the Sainsbury's package. Maybe you shouldn't eat exclusively that thing, but you probably shouldn't eat any one thing exclusively anyway. 

From a very brief foray, it seems that the emotional loading of food is rife within the vegan (and especially the raw/foodblogging) community. On both an ethical and a health level. There are a lot of people who are searching for the most ultimately sanctimonious way of eating - the thing that is the absolute best for their bodies (rarely backed up by decent nutritional science or historical evidence that most humans can eat meat and fish and dairy and not suffer from ill effects), and which has the least impact on the lives of other creatures and on the world around them. 

I'm all for low-impact food, but not when it becomes the sole focus of one's life. It's a fact of the modern world that mass importing/transportation/farming processes aren't always great for the environment, but also that most of us are so damn busy all the time that it's impossible to live the best of all possible lives, food-wise. We balance the two. We do as much as we can to reduce our impact whilst still getting up and going to work every morning and having a good time. And the puritanical aspect of some of the culinary extremism that can be witnessed on these very interwebs is indicative of a mentality which wants to take every drop of joy out of food and eating. Orthorexia may not be medically recognised, but it's an interesting framework through which to view this effect.

At times, the militance becomes dangerous. I saw at least three examples of people who claimed to manage their cancer/other serious or terminal illness entirely through a vegan/raw diet. It's dangerous both for them and for the people they influence. Touting any dietary changes as some kind of miracle cure for disease - as a cure for the absolute fact of mortality, almost - is irresponsible and should not be encouraged. And yet I didn't see many voices of dissent within those communities. Possibly because the dissenters are all people like me: fans of modern medicine who are angered too much by the concept of a diet curing cancer to stay around long enough to comment. One of the most powerful lessons the Internet has taught us is that you can't engage people in meaningful debate if they don't want to engage, even if you're pretty sure you're right. 

As well as delving into the world of vegan blogging, I also got up to speed with the ex-vegan community, which is pretty interesting itself. It's made up of people who were formerly notable vegan/raw bloggers who decided not to remain vegan and went public about this decision, often because their diets were having a deleterious effect on their health. The response from the hard-line vegans was often outrageous - one woman was told that she and her family deserved to be killed like the animals they had gone back to eating. The response was much stronger than the complaints these hardcore vegans levied against people who had always eaten meat and never been vegan, most likely because of the sense of betrayal invoked by a high-profile vegan publicly going back to meat-eating. Which brings us, once again, to the emotional loading of food and lifestyle.

At heart, what I do and don't feel comfortable eating boils down to the level of cognitive dissonance which I'm happy experiencing. Everyone is walking around with a head full of the stuff - it's how we're not all constantly curled up in the foetal position, unable to comprehend the cruelty of the world. And I'm reasonably sure that this is also how other people decide what they will and won't eat. The level of cognitive dissonance which someone like Sali Owen can process is very different to the level experienced by someone who eats everything - and that's fine. I'd spent the last couple of years wondering if I'd continue to be able to justify (to myself) eating animal products which don't result in the death of the animal. And it turns out that I can.

On a conscious level, I'm concerned about the ethics of dairy farming. I think there are many things wrong with the way we mass-produce food in general, particularly when it's harmful to the welfare of sentient creatures, and to that end I've tried for many years to be as conscious of this as I can when choosing what dairy I do eat (the freest of the free-range eggs, and the like). I drink mostly soy milk, partly because I prefer the taste and partly because I know that it didn't cause distress or discomfort to any cows. But I don't find that I care enough about it to avoid dairy altogether. Objectively, the suffering of animals in dairy production is as distasteful to me as the thought of eating their flesh; on a day-to-day basis, and especially when it's cooked into something pre-produced, or when it's in work, or when it's a trace of milk powder (unnecessary but ubiquitous) in something like tortilla chips, I can't bring myself to care enough to stop eating these things.

It's now the 3rd of February, and I still haven't broken veganism and probably won't until we go to Meat Liquor tomorrow, when I intend to cram large amounts of halloumi into my face. Veganuary was a fascinating experiment, but I don't have the desire or commitment to be entirely vegan all of the time. The current plan is to eat almost exclusively vegan at home and at work (with occasional exceptions), and to be vegan where possible but more likely lacto-ovo vegetarian when I'm eating out. So veg*n, with a tendency towards the vegan end of the spectrum. This is a level of cognitive dissonance I'm content with.

"Even if religion isn't true..."

Or, why I'll read Alain de Botton's new book but don't like its ad campaign.

Alain de Botton is a fascinating man. On Twitter, he's one of the most consistently thought-provoking people to follow, dispensing 140-character chunks of serene wisdom, many of which are deeply applicable to the state of the human condition in the modern world.

I read Status Anxiety when I was fifteen, and thought it was wonderful (although it's almost certainly in need of a re-read now that I'm no longer fifteen). His new book, Religion for Atheists, looks like it's going to be lots of things I'm very interested in - not least the idea that one can be an atheist and still appreciate the trappings of religion.

I love religious architecture and music, but it irks me that such glorious, transcendental, humbling things have been built and made by man to the glory of God, when so few things built to the glory of mankind and man's achievements are on a similarly mind-blowing scale. We're getting there, especially in terms of art, music and literature (less so architecturally, but still somewhat), and I have no doubt that, as society drifts further towards atheism in the most literal sense, this trend will continue. Humans make beautiful things. We can't help ourselves. And there doesn't need to be a higher power to justify this creation. The range of human experience - the vast, mutable palette of human emotion - are enough to keep us creatively occupied until there are no more of us. Having a constant to continually compare that to, in a world where nothing is constant, is impractical and unnecessary.

My only concern with the release of Religion for Atheists is the advertising campaign which accompanies it. The adverts are a series of gorgeous images of religious structures, with the tagline, "Even if religion isn't true, can't we enjoy the best bits?"

I applaud and support the sentiment; it's the usage of "true" which troubles me. It jarred my ear as soon as I read it. Of the relevant definitions of "true", it's a choice between "conforming to the actual state of reality or fact; factually correct" and "legitimate". And it's clear that the advert isn't using "true" in the sense of legitimate (e.g. referring to the Catholic Church as the "one true Church"). Which leaves us with "conforming to the actual state of reality or fact."

My issue with "even if religion isn't true" is that I don't like the application of "true" to broad, sweeping concepts. "True" suggests a reasonably straightforward true/false dichotomy. Which is not something that "religion", as a noun, presents us with. You could take "government" as a comparable conceptual noun. No one is going to argue that government isn't true. Whether or not it exists is something you could theoretically doubt ("even if government isn't real..."), and you could certainly take it to mean "legitimate" (though modern English does not tend to use "true" to mean "legitimate" except as an identifier, like in "the one true Church"), calling upon the "true government" either as a request for a government to step up to the plate on something or in contrast to a non-legitimate government, but one would not ask the question, "Even if government is not true, can't we still enjoy the best bits?" Nor, even, would one state, "government is not true." Not valid, sure. Not real, maybe. But "true" or "not true" in a strictly true/false, "factually correct" usage (as I believe it is being used in this case)? No.

It's a subtle usage - perhaps not even incorrect, but questionable enough to set off my inner alarm bells. On the surface, the statements implied by the question asked by the advert - "religion is/isn't true" - sound as though they mean functionally the same thing as "I do/don't believe in religion" (as a concept, and as opposed to believing in God). The statement "I do/don't believe in religion" are not useful or functional tools for examining the role of religion within society. And whilst "even if religion isn't true" does not quite mean exactly the same thing semantically, there's not much of a mental leap between "I don't believe in religion" and "religion is/is not true."

The question which the first clause of the advert implies, "is religion true?", is a redundant one, and not useful to the conceptual framework in which the book (I dearly hope) attempts to examine the role of the trappings of religion in the life of the modern atheist. If de Botton's examination will (as I hope it will) open the debate on creating glorious things in the glory of man, not God, then we cannot afford sloppy copy. Atheism, to me, at this time, should need no justification or legitimisation in the eyes of the world, yet still it does. For a long time, we've had some of the best thinkers. Ideas - precious ideas about the infinite potential of the secular life - need to be grounded and clothed in the best possible words we can muster. And "Even if religion isn't true..." doesn't quite cut it.

An Uncensored Life

Yesterday evening, at long last, I watched the most recent episode of Sherlock (S02E02, 'The Hounds of Baskerville') and it dredged up a long-forgotten childhood memory of the fact that my whole family was mauled by giant dogs from Hell.

Quick critique on the show itself: I've heard from quite a few Sherlock fans that they were disappointed by last week's episode, and from watching it I can see why. It was interesting that the explanations for the strange occurrences around the Baskerville site as suggested by the locals were along the lines of some kind of horrible beast created by genetic research - I thought this was quite a good 21st Century parallel for the mythological/folkoloric suggestions from the original Sherlock Holmes novel, but at the same time I kind of missed the supernatural element because I really love Dartmoor mythology and folklore (this is what you get when you take nerdy kids to National Trust bookshops and allow them to purchase volumes entitled Ghastly Ghosts of Devon and the like, but more on that later).

The way they shot Dartmoor itself was also very interesting, although again I was slightly disappointed. There were a lot of panoramic shots where they kind of messed with the colours a little bit to make it look more vast and bleak and forbidding, which is an entirely natural cinematographic response to that kind of landscape, but it didn't work for me (although it wouldn't have looked out-of-place in an adaptation of, say, Wuthering Heights). The great thing about Dartmoor, as a couple of the local characters mentioned during the episode, is precisely how vast and bleak it is, but that for me was lost in the way they shot it. Especially the vastness. There's a certain perspective you sometimes get when standing around on Dartmoor, not even anywhere particularly special like on top of a tor, just by the side of the road looking across acres of gorse scrubland, wherein everything you are feels infinitely dwarfed by the untameable, untillable, barely-inhabitable land. And the big, fancy shots of it that they put into last week's Sherlock managed to completely lose that aspect of the scenery. The more intimate bits shot in "Dewer's Hollow" (which doesn't exist, although there are plenty of places very much like it which do) gave a much better feel for the landscape close-up than any of the panoramas did (although it's entirely possible that those bits weren't filmed on Dartmoor at all).

A lot of the plot elements were stupid (as one of the people I watched it with mentioned, why would a super-secret CIA experiment have its own t-shirts?), but on balance it was at least an entertaining (if not perhaps as intellectually tantalising) episode. I did like the fact that they showed Sherlock experiencing doubt and fear; that was a really nice piece of characterisation.

But enough on that. What those ninety minutes managed to remind me of (aside from how much I love Devon) was my first foray into the library held at our primary school. This would have been in late 1994, during my first full term at school; our infant class was dutifully marshalled down to the library in small groups and told that we could pick any volume we chose to take home and have our parents read to us. I would like to emphasise the word any; perhaps this is more about my earliest experiences with the fallibility of adult authority, but I digress. I was overwhelmed by the possibilities offered to me. My reading experience thus far had consisted of the formulaic books we were using to learn to read, filled with poorly-developed (and illustrated, if I'm honest) farmyard characters and little to offer in the way of narrative intrigue. So to be presented with a room full of books which were filled with completely new pictures and stories seemed wonderful.

I chose, being a morbid five-year-old, an illustrated (and, I presume, heavily abridged) kids' edition of The Hound of the Baskervilles. Show me the five-year-old who would not rather be reading about a flaming-eyed murderous hell-hound than, say, Spot the Dog, and I'll lose my remaining faith in humanity. I cannot fully express how entirely awesome this kids' version of The Hound of the Baskervilles looked. I was practically foaming with literary rabies at the prospect of taking it home and forcing my parents or grandparents to read it to me. It was like a shining beacon in a sea of battered tomes. I can remember many things about that day, in that room, but what any of the other books offered looked like or consisted of are details lost to my memory. I plucked The Hound off the shelf and proudly presented it to whichever teaching assistant was there with us, to "show us around the library". Or, as it turned out, to censor what we read. For that is what she did.

I was told in no uncertain terms that The Hound of the Baskervilles, even in such an innocent and childish incarnation, was entirely unsuitable reading material for little girls. Being a ballsy thing, I protested, and was once again told that I could not have it. I believe (although perhaps this is just years of anger about a] the whole experience and b] the way gender is hammered into children from almost every source during every developmental period) that I was offered something more girl-specific as an alternative choice. But no other choice (and certainly not whatever I ended up being fobbed off with, the memory of which escapes me) was in fact anything resembling my choice, since I had chosen and subsequently been denied the right of choice.

There's an incredibly happy ending to this story, though. The people with the most power to censor my reading - my parents - chose at almost every opportunity not to. I can recall perhaps only one or two attempts made by my parents to stop me from reading something they considered unsuitable, and those were almost certainly both Jilly Coopers furtively stolen from my grandmother at the age of nine. I have no idea why, when they were fairly overprotective about many other aspects of my young life (including in particular the films and television I was exposed to), they made so few attempts to control what it was that I read. It could have been the speed at which I read - books were coming in and out of the house at such a frantic rate, and often with so little involvement from them, that what I was reading was pointless or impossible to police. Or perhaps, especially when I was a little older, it was that they had not themselves read what I was reading, and thus couldn't comment on its suitability.

It was a glorious and remarkable freedom, and one which I would urge all parents to grant to their children, no matter how much they long to shelter them from the shocks and hurts of the world. It meant that I was occasionally reading wildly inappropriate things, books whose contents I had no register of tone or emotion by which to frame and thus properly understand. Will Self, for example, is a startling writer even now - when I was thirteen, his novels were just penetrable enough to be unsettling without me realising how darkly funny they were also intended to be. The same goes for Don DeLillo - I read White Noise entirely straight when I was fifteen, and it was only when I came back to study it for a dissertation that I realised how funny a book it is. These wildly inappropriate things did not damage me in the slightest - and neither would The Hound of the Baskervilles have done, had I been allowed it. One of my favourite things to do when I was a lot younger was to read something that frightened me so much I could not sleep. That the human imagination is capable of producing such an effect is a glorious thing, to be treasured rather than prevented.

The great thing about literature is that so much of it self-censors, depending on the reading age (and, perhaps more importantly, the emotional maturity) of the young reader. So much of description, narrative and tone can be gained or lost by the reader. It was precisely because I had been allowed to read widely and rangingly that I came to love reading so very much. Censorship does not protect; it merely makes children bitter and angry towards the censors.

So please do not censor the reading of your children. Their development will censor itself, up to a point, and even after that they're unlikely to be damaged by what they read. Many of my earliest memories involve reading and books, and for kids who don't easily make friends, a book is a passage into a world where the social constraints of day-to-day life do not matter in the slightest. A book is a true friend, even if it appears to be a chain-smoking, hard-drinking, too-much-makeup-wearing older kid, trying to lead your child astray. Reading is one of the safest ways a child can thus be led.

2012 - Resolutions

There's a word I was trying to remember earlier on, whilst watching The West Wing (Season 3 Episode 6, 'War Crimes') with my housemate. Bartlet comes back from church ranting about how awful the sermon was, how it lacked panache, and how the preacher fundamentally misunderstood the passage from Ephesians that the sermon was meant to be about. The President's interpretation of the verses was not that they pertained to the relationship between a man and his wife, but that they are all about the passage, "Be subject to one another."

The word I was looking for is accountability. Accountability to one another is incredibly important. It reminds us of our better selves. It reminds us that we shouldn't do stupid, hurtful things to other people. It's a great reality check, except in the case of mass delusion: if I do something or want to do something that I'm not sure of the ethics of, and someone whose judgement I trust agrees with me that it's an okay thing to do or to have done, then that's good enough for me, and it's a stronger indication than just my judgement alone. I'm not saying that one cannot live an ethical life without someone to be accountable to, more that for those of us who are particularly human it can be really useful to have a gate. And sometimes both you and the person you consider yourself accountable to are wrong about something, but somehow that makes it better than just you being wrong. At least, it does for me.

In 2011 I made resolutions at the beginning of the year. Some of them I kept and some of them I failed at, but I didn't really publicise any of them. I told people casually that I was trying to do this, or that, or the other, but I wasn't really accountable to anyone but myself. And that was fine. I didn't need to be, and I don't think I would have succeeded at any more of them if I'd stated my aims publicly at the start of the year. But there's something nice and satisfying about writing my resolutions for 2012 down on some stone tablets at the top of a mountain somewhere in the Holy Land and then proclaiming them to those who care to listen, so to speak.

So I am being accountable here. I don't need or want a cheerleading team, or a stern, authoritarian power outside of myself to shame me into keeping or not keeping them. I just want to let it be known that this is what I hope to achieve this year.

- To read all of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu:

I received a complete translation for Christmas. Never have I been so afraid of a Christmas present in my life.

- To be vegan in January, and to generally eat less dairy in 2012:

I find myself increasingly using cheese as a condiment. I'm hoping that Veganuary will both make me think more about what I cook and eat, and will instil in me a proper and fitting reverence for cheese.

- Not to eat a single Ginsters cheese and onion slice:

This is kind of a subset of Veganuary, and is mostly motivated by the fact that the aforementioned slices do not even slightly resemble food. That they are frequently reduced in the Co Op, and that I am frequently hung over, are not reasonable grounds for putting these monstrous things into my system.

- To be more forgiving and less bearing of grudges:

I come from a long line of grudge-bearers. My mother once didn't speak to her father for six months over a fight they had about a biscuit. I don't want to be that guy, difficult as it can be to let go of stupid, petty things at times. They're always stupid and petty, and life would be better if I didn't hang on to them for a long time, or, ideally, at all.

- To be formally excommunicated from the Catholic Church:

I have been functionally an atheist since the age of five, when a priest could not satisfy me on a point of theology. There have been times in my life when I attempted to find religion, but I'm just not wired for faith. It is ludicrous that a decision could have been made for me at an age when I was not sufficiently intellectually developed to object which is incredibly difficult for me as a rational adult to extricate myself from. It used to be that one could formally defect from the Catholic Church, which was easier to achieve than excommunication, but they closed that loophole in canon law some time in 2010. In order to be excommunicated, I have several options, including assaulting the Pope or a high-up Cardinal (I'm not such a fan of beating up old men, and this might result in a prison sentence), desecrating the Host (this would probably require going to Communion, which I don't want to do) or proving my apostasy. I am very much looking forward to writing the letter by which I intend to declare myself an apostate.

See you in 2013 for an update on how all of these went.

The Year of 100 Books

In an attempt to recapture the frantic hunger with which I would consume books in my youth, I decided that in 2011 I would try to read 100. Now, there's been a lot written about how being well-read is a fundamentally pointless endeavour, and how no human can hope to catch everything important in one lifetime, and at least one of those articles (if I remember rightly) discusses the idea that any attempt to master any given canon can be read as an attempt to cheat death. I don't think I was by any means trying to cheat death in reading these books this year, but it's an interesting theory.

In November 2010 I began (and aborted) a short story about a man who has read every book ever published, and in doing so gains entry to a small society of individuals who have achieved the same feat. The story kind of hinged on the idea that he wouldn't have to keep up with new books that had been published since he stopped reading - that "the entirety of books ever written" was a finite concept instead of one that keeps expanding out towards the borders of space - and in that sense it wasn't a very good short story. But the idea intrigued me. I picked 100 as a nice, manageable number which still sounded kind of impressive. There's a movement of people who try to read 365 books in 365 days, but I wanted a number that wouldn't interfere with the way I live my life - I'd spend more time reading than I had in 2010, for sure, but not to the extent that it stopped me from doing anything normal. There would be days when I didn't read at all, and there was a month when I hardly read anything (July, when I moved back to Cambridge and started a new job).

I'd expected, foolishly, that an English degree which ostensibly covered all British literature and some from other countries from 1300 to the present day would chuck me out on the other side with a much better grasp of what had been written in these isles (and other lands) during that time. It did not. If anything, my degree left me feeling less well-read than I had felt before I embarked upon it. And, what's more, I felt like I was losing my edge. In school it had been remarkably easy to be better-read than almost everyone I knew, particularly since I had books instead of boyfriends at that age. And at Cambridge I was doing okay - I was either slightly better-read or about the same as most of the people I encountered. But the degree knocked the sheer joy of reading out of me, and I didn't rediscover it as quickly as I'd hoped I would after I graduated. So this challenge, in 2011, was in part an attempt to get that back.

Some of the books I read were works of great literature, and some were not. Some were excellent and some were execrable. Do I feel like I'm suitably well-read now, or that I've caught up, or that I finally have my edge back? Do I hell.

The rules were simple: no cheating (a book had to be read from cover to cover to count) and no re-reading of books already read. The second was much harder to achieve - I yearned, at points, for books I'd read before. But ultimately I managed to resist the temptation. I haven't included poetry, as I rarely sit down and read a book of poetry all the way through.

Without further preamble, here is the list:

January

Fun Home - Alison Bechdel
The Year of the Flood - Margaret Atwood
Morality Play - Barry Unsworth
Players - Don DeLillo
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
One Day - David Nicholls
A Pale View of Hills - Kazuo Ishiguro
Shoplifting from American Apparel - Tao Lin
Be Near Me - Andrew O'Hagan
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Down to a Sunless Sea - David Graham
The Blue Flower - Penelope Fitzgerald

February

Cakes and Ale - W. Somerset Maugham
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
A Scanner Darkly - Philip K. Dick
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick
Minority Report & Other Stories - Philip K. Dick
Our Fathers - Andrew O'Hagan
The Beginning of Spring - Penelope Fitzgerald
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Lady Chatterley's Lover - D. H. Lawrence

March

The Art Fair - David Lipsky
So Many Ways to Begin - Jon McGregor
Lover of Unreason - Yehuda Koren & Eilat Negev
Persuasion - Jane Austen
Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen
Couch Fiction - Philippa Perry
Mansfield Park - Jane Austen
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer
The Prescription Errors - Charles Demers
Lunar Park - Bret Easton Ellis
The Tent - Margaret Atwood
Blindness - José Saramago
Model Behaviour - Jay McInerney
Identity - Milan Kundera

April

The Bell - Iris Murdoch
Frenchman's Creek - Daphne du Maurier
Naked Spirits - Adrian Abbotts
The Return of the Native - Thomas Hardy
Tam Lin - Pamela Dean
Far from the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
Animal Farm - George Orwell
Big If - Mark Costello
Everything is Illuminated - Jonathan Safran Foer

May

The Flight from the Enchanter - Iris Murdoch
The Spot - David Means
The Promise of Happiness - Justin Cartwright
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
The Italian Girl - Iris Murdoch
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers
The Death of Grass - John Christopher
The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios - Yann Martel
The Secret Scripture - Sebastian Barry
The Grass Arena - John Healy
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

June

Fludd - Hilary Mantel
Everyman - Philip Roth
Bossypants - Tina Fey
Mr Norris Changes Trains - Christopher Isherwood
A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
The Pale King - David Foster Wallace
Jonathan Livingston Seagull - Richard Bach
Oh! What a Paradise it Seems - John Cheever
The Quiet American - Graham Greene

July

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again - David Foster Wallace
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead - Tom Stoppard

August

I Capture the Castle - Dodie Smith
A Kestrel for a Knave - Barry Hines
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke

September

A Staggering Work of Heartbreaking Genius - Dave Eggers
Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys
Understanding Comics - Scott McCloud
Lincoln's Melancholy - Joshua Wolf Shenk
Young Victorians - Marion Lochhead
How To Be a Woman - Caitlin Moran
Nemesis - Philip Roth
V for Vendetta - Alan Moore & David Lloyd

October

Unlikely - Jeffrey Brown
Save Me the Waltz - Zelda Fitzgerald
Ethan Frome - Edith Wharton
The Game - A.S. Byatt
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien
Feynman - Jim Ottaviani & Leland Myrick
The Green Mile - Stephen King

November

Nocturnes - Kazuo Ishiguro
Summer Blonde - Adrian Tomine
Sleepwalk - Adrian Tomine
Blue Pills - Frederik Peeters
A Fairly Honourable Defeat - Iris Murdoch
The Reluctant Fundamentalist - Mohsin Hamid
The Lean Startup - Eric Ries
Agonizing Love - Michael Barson

December

Oscar and Lucinda - Peter Carey
Scenes from an Impending Marriage - Adrian Tomine
Good Omens - Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman
Jill - Philip Larkin
Hark! A Vagrant - Kate Beaton
I Never Liked You - Chester Brown
Blankets - Craig Thompson
Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman - Ralph Leighton, Richard P. Feynman & Edward Hutchings
The Treatment - Daniel Menaker
The Millstone - Margaret Drabble

By my count, that's 104. I'm not counting the book I'm currently reading (The Member of the Wedding - Carson McCullers), as it's very unlikely I'll finish it before midnight.

The best ten books I read all year were, in no particular order:

- Fun Home
- The Beginning of Spring
- Blankets
- The Bell
- The Handmaid's Tale
- Be Near Me
- The Things They Carried
- The Pale King
- A Prayer for Owen Meany
- Fludd

I don't know that I can pick a ten worst, but the second-worst book I read all year was One Day (seriously, people liked this?) and the absolute worst by quite a long margin was The Prescription Errors - it was pointlessly violent, meandering, almost entirely plotless, confusing, the shifts in perspective were not well executed and most of what was in it seemed to have been included for the sake of it rather than because it added to the book in any meaningful way.

So, that was a thing. In 2012 I plan to make a list of everything I read again but will probably not read as many books. And, although I've barely dented the sheer number of worthwhile books which abound, it was a thoroughly enjoyable experience.

2011 - Resolutions

I never used to be the kind of person who made New Year's resolutions. I think I thought that self-improvement was for losers, or something, or perhaps that I couldn't be improved - not that I was already perfect, but that I was so far from perfectible that it was useless even to try to work on one small thing. I stopped eating meat on the 1st of January 2006, but even that wasn't so much about self-improvement or about seeing if I could do something for an extended period of time as much as a growing distaste for flesh and disinclination to continue to eat it. The New Year's thing was more a culturally-sanctioned way of finally making a decision I'd wanted to make for some time than anything.

And then last year brought an explosion of resolutions. I think I was feeling particularly optimistic around Christmas and New Year - I had just come back from the US, I had a terrible job but was at least being paid money, things were looking pretty good. I'd done things in 2010 that I hadn't ever done before, including graduating, visiting a different continent and living in another country. The time felt ripe for self-improvement, and this is what I vowed I was going to do:

- Learn German
- Keep a journal
- Be more generous towards my friends with my time
- Learn to play the piano
- Finish my novel
- Be more polite in everyday situations
- Read 100 books

And here's how they went, in order:

German

2011 wasn't the first time I'd vowed to learn German, and you may not be surprised to learn that I still can't speak it for shit. The fact that I was visiting Germany for the first time in July looked like it would be sufficient motivation to finally crack out the books and make a go of it. And I utterly failed. Of all the things I was trying to cram into my life in the first part of the year, it was the one I was least committed to and the first one to be dropped. Of the BBC listening exercises I did, I can still remember a couple of them almost word-perfect, which says a lot more about the way my memory works than anything. Verdammt.

Journal

Again, this wasn't the first journal I'd ever vowed to keep, nor was it the first I failed at. Selected quotations include,"I rarely meet burritos I don't like" and, "Surrounded by businessmen. Slept v. badly last night." I think a journal is a very worthy thing to keep if a) you enjoy doing it and/or b) you write about interesting things. This exercise ticked neither box for me. I read over all of the entries from January 2011 the other day, and whilst they were very good at evoking some of the exact sensations and events I experienced during that month, the writing and subject matter was fundamentally uninteresting. I tend to feel that there's something more important or interesting that I could be writing if I'm going to be writing at all, and journals therefore seem like a waste of time. My grandmother has kept a diary for that last goodness-knows-how-many years, filled with entries along the lines of, "Charlotte came for tea. Weather mild." She recently said, "my diaries are up in the cupboard in the spare bedroom, so you can all have a good laugh when I'm dead." I don't want to leave a similar burden to my descendants after I'm gone.

Generosity with Time

By this I meant quite specifically that I would try to stop blowing my friends off whenever I didn't feel like being sociable. It was a more pressing thing when I was living 300 miles away from them, and I did it with the best intentions. I can be very selfish with my time if I don't feel particularly like seeing anyone or talking to anyone, and I was curious to see if this was something I could correct by keeping it in mind and trying to overcome it. This was not the case. It worked all right for a month or so, until the periodic desire to make a hermit of myself grew stronger than the feeling of duty I had to be less of a dick when my friends wanted to talk to me. In retrospect, I think the fact that I occasionally need a lot of downtime is more a fundamental part of my personality than anything, and thus this was never going to be an easy fix. I still think mindfulness of personal flaws is worthwhile, and attempting this did at least make me a bit more self-aware, which is probably not a bad thing.

Piano

This got off to a slow start, as we didn't get a piano until early May. As soon as we got one, I practised every day and made some reasonably decent progress. Then I moved back to Cambridge at the end of June, and that was kind of that. I'd still like to continue to learn to play, and will probably take lessons and buy either an electric piano with weighted keys or an acoustic as soon as I have money. And, coming home this Christmas, I found that I haven't become appreciably worse in spite of not having played for six months, which just shows how pervasive muscle memory is.

Novel

Finished Part I at the end of January and the whole thing in May, then spent the summer and autumn editing the hell out of it. It's not exactly a thing of beauty, but I did get a huge kick out of writing it and to that end have begun another.

Politesse

This resolution came out of the fact that I have in the past been notoriously impolite, not so much out of any fundamental rudeness but because I found being publicly and vocally polite deeply embarrassing. I have no idea why I found it so blush-inducingly shameful to thank someone for having me or tell them what a lovely time I had or any of the other little social pleasantries that make everything go along a lot smoother. It wasn't that I wasn't grateful - often I'd be overflowing with gratitude but too awkward to express it. So I jumped in at the deep end and tried to be as courteous as I possibly could in all situations which called for it. And it worked - I got over my embarrassment, I'm now suitable to be received into semi-polite company and I actually really enjoy being polite. I haven't quite been able to stop swearing loudly in the street or in the presence of children (although I've curbed it quite a bit), but the rest of it is pretty much engrained now. An unexpected and happy side effect is that I now find it much easier to make small talk with (and tip!) people working in the service industry, when before I felt embarrassed for both of us that they were making me a coffee or driving me to the station or whatever. The only negative effect I've experienced is that I now notice when other people aren't polite much more than I ever did before, and it really grates on me.

100 Books

This is going to get a blog post all to itself at the very end of the year/beginning of 2012, in part because I reckon I can squeeze at least another book in before Sunday. More on that story later, and a full list (possibly with short reviews of each) will follow.

I also took up blogging again in 2011, and whilst I haven't done it as often as I'd like, it seems to be going vaguely okay.

I've got a few things lined up that I'd like to work on in 2012 and will probably write them up fairly soon.

It's the time of the season...

When I was a lazy undergraduate, frittering away my eight-week terms and revelling in (read: equally frittering away) endless holidays, I used to wonder how real grownups managed when they only got a week or so off at a time. This year has been all about learning that real grownups are in fact immensely grateful that they get any time off at all.

Don't get me wrong, I love going to work and will very much miss everyone over the break. But it's going to be very nice to do absolutely nothing for ten days.

Towards the end of the year I'll be doing a writeup of all the books I've read this year, plus some general ramblings and resolutions and all that kind of jazz, so stay tuned.