Round about this time, with February's dark and rainy evenings still with us, it's always good to open up a crisp new book for 2007. I myself have just plunged into Maurice Riordan's The Holy Land. After all, there's nothing like poetry to refresh the soul.
But by the time another season of dark and rainy evenings gets under way, how much will I actually remember of my books of 2007? I recall having a diligent friend at school who had his own version of a literary black book and recorded the month and time he read the book and could sit back on hogmanay night and look back through his reading year.
I know of others who mark the time and place they bought the book on in the inside cover, which is great when travelling and a nice reminder of place stories and time. Seeing as a lot of my life is spent in front of a screen there are quite a few cataloguing programmes that do a really nice job of setting up an electronic catalogue, but their purpose is mostly to record your library and not really what you read each year.
Surely some research must have been done into people's life-reading patterns, and how authors and ages are linked? I must say it would be fascinating to see one's reading steps traced back to your first memorable book.
Perhaps publishers could help out here with an end of year email to thank you for what you have bought, or I am sure Amazon would jump at the chance to sum up the year for us all.
As for me, I'm not sure what I will do. Perhaps the simplest answer is to look on the shelves and think back, keep books of this year in one place, register them on a profile or a blog.
Then again it might be worth spending a bit more time, typing out a quote from each book with the time and date stamps and sticking them on a wall for a fascinating collage. Perhaps this could even make for a new end of year after-dinner game.
How do you remember your reading?
