Book Around the Corner

Now that you know all about my favorite reads for 2021, let’s have a look at my reading projects for 2022. They include the inevitable “Kill the TBR” part, probably only to allow myself to buy more books and end up with the same number of unread books come December 31st. Oh well. One of the great pleasure of life is visiting bookshops. I’ll never spend a whole year without buying a single book.

My 2022 reading year will include the books I’ll read along with my Book Club and with my sister-in-law.

That’s already 15 books, out of the 75 read every year.

2022 will see two major centenaries for French literature. It is the centenary of Proust’s death and the fourth centenary of Molière’s birth.

I’ll have a Proust Centenary event. I want to finally finish my reread of In Search of Lost Time. I also have several works by Prousts or Proust related books on the shelf. Time to read them! The Proust Centenary reading list is:

• Albertine disparue by Marcel Proust
• Le temps retrouvé by Marcel Proust
• Proust by Samuel Beckett
• Days of Reading by Marcel Proust
• The Mysterious Correspondant. New Stories by Marcel Proust
• Le mensuel retrouvé by Marcel Proust

I hope to be able to visit the Proust exhibition at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris. I’d love to visit Aunt Léonie’s house in Illiers-Combray but it’s like a six-hour drive to go there.

I’ll probably do something about Molière’s centenary too. I will see Le Bourgeois gentilhomme in May, it’s in my theatre subscription for 2022. I’m tempted to reread Le Misanthrope. We’ll see how things go on that front. I have already published several billets about Molière’s plays as he’s my favorite playwright.

I will also participate to various reading challenges and blogging events because I enjoy the book blogging community and also because it’s a good way to tackle the TBR. I try to pick books from the TBR for these events and to kill several birds with one stone.

So far, I’ve spotted several events.

The first one is the year-long Nonfiction Reader Challenge, a good way to decrease the Nonfiction TBR. There are twelve categories but I can’t really find one book per category, so I choose de Nonfiction Grazer status, meaning I can read whatever nonfiction book I want. Here’s my list, which overlaps with Book Club and Proust Centenary lists.

My daughter is spending a year in UofSC and I hope we’ll be able to visit the area next summer. I’ve chosen several books to read from the Appalachians and the Carolinas.

• A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
• Country Dark by Chris Offutt
• Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
• Serena by Ron Rash
• Above the Waterfall by Ron Rash
• All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren

Have already been announced : Japanese Literature Challenge, Larry McMurtry 2022 for which I want to read Lonesome Dove, and the 1954 Club. (I have The Ponder Heart by Eudora Welty on the shelf)

All this makes 30-35 books, all from the TBR, Yay! For the rest, we’ll where my mood takes me and how life goes. I only want to have fun, learn new things, do some armchair travels and spend time with books.

What are your reading projects for 2022?