A Modest Folio Society read target for 2024

I'm hoping to read more of my Folio Society books this year.

Without setting myself up for failure with a list which I'll never aspire to, I'm limiting myself to 10 books, some of which I've read, some of which I've never read, in any form. But none have been read in FS form.

1. The Anatomy of Melancholy 3v
2. The Living Mountain
3. The City of God 2v
4. The History of the English Church and people
5. Vita Nuova
6. Civilisation
7. Ring of the Nibelung
8. Pepys Diary 3v
9. British Myths and Legends 3v
10. The History of the Church

Not overly ambitious I think.

What's your plans if any?

>1 LesMiserables: You can do it!

I've been renewing a library ebook of The Living Mountain since 2022 and have only made it through the introduction. I have a weird aversion to ebooks, so I caved and ordered a sale copy. This year's the year.

I'll match you with my ten, although not such a hefty list as yours:

1. The Living Mountain
2. The Mystery of the Yellow Room (to finish off the locked-room box set)
3. Melmoth the Wanderer (a lot of buzz about this lately)
4. Anna Karenina
5. Mr. Rabbit’s Symphony of Nature (a 10 minute read before I give it as a gift)
6. Manhattan ’45 (from last year's sale, still unread)
7. Shah of Shahs (ditto)
8. The Black Tulip
9. Towers of Trebizond
10. Period Piece

And I hope to finish working my way through the Evelyn Waugh Comedies box set as well.

Good one, this is a reading target I can get behind. Modest, no pressure, Folio-aspirant. (Although your multi-volume nominations are impressive.)

Thinking and ogling my shelves…

1. Dune (read book x2 but not my FS!)
2. Cider for Rosie (have read the sequel)
3. The Castle (last of my Kafka’s)
4. Oliver Twist (III Nonesuch)
5. The Good Soldier
6. Lucky Jim
7. The Fatal Shore
8. The Blind Watchmaker
9. Doctor Thorne
10. Tarka the Otter

No plans to specifically read FS books. Indeed, I didn't actually finish a single Folio volume in 2023. However, I have an ongoing project to read Dickens's novels in publication order, and my copies are a Folio set, so they tend to get read in that sort of way. Indeed Barnaby Rudge is that yet to be finished volume. Other FS books are lined up to be read as part of other projects, but sadly, just as you remain understandably disappointed about FS and Scott, one of my main ones this year is to crack on with Zola's Rougon-Macquart sequence, to which FS can contribute little (nor much to my other big focus: reading around the world).

Oddly enough, the one book I have finished so far this year is one for a book group, A Passage To India, which I have as part of my Forster Folio set, so already got off to a better start! It would have been 2, as I've moved on to Daniel Deronda for my other group, but, almost uniquely for a classic author, I sold my Eliot set a year or so ago - it was quite the most unattractive set I'd seen, a big disappointment.

That list of yours might be 'limited' to 10, but still represents some hefty reading - good luck!

>1 LesMiserables: Your interests are quite different to mine. Only The Living Mountain overlaps. It might sound childish, but when starting a book I always look at how many pages there are and mentally compute my completion percentage as I work my way through it. I have no idea how many pages your reading list has but I have a feeling these are serious tomes. If it were me I would figure out the total pages! Good luck with them.

One of my pleasures is, having finished a book, looking through my unread books and deciding what to read next. What do I feel like reading at that particular moment? For example I rarely want to read a long book immediately after another long one and usually like to read something quite different to my last book. I don't want to lose that pleasure by committing ahead of time. Having said that, I have wanted to read the Art of War by Sun-Tzu for a very long time so I hope to accomplish that at some point this year.

I have signed up for the 75 book challenge so should get through many of my unread FS books this year. I am on my fifth book of the year. Only one to date has been a FS edition.

Some challenging reads listed above but two favourites of mine from the listings which have stood the test of time are ‘Lucky Jim’ which makes most readers laugh out loud and the most mystical ‘Towers of Trebizond’.

>6 English-bookseller: If you like Lucky Jim, you should try The Education of Hyman Kaplan. Unfortunately, it hasn't been published by FS (yet?). It's probably the only book I would be willing to buy even as a LE edition.
For some reason, it's become almost forgotten in English-speaking countries but it's pretty popular in Eastern Europe.

Here is my ambitious list of Folio Society books for 2024. I just finished the Remarque and am midway through Runciman:

1. Burton – Partition 3 of Anatomy of Melancholy
2. Nancy Mitford – The Sun King
3. Helen Castor – She-Wolves
4. Chabon – The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
5. Ian Fleming –You Only Live Twice
6. Patrick O’Brian – The Fortune of War
7. C.S. Forester – Hornblower and the Atropos
8. Eco – The Name of the Rose
9. Voltaire -- History of Charles XII of Sweden
10. Remarque – All Quiet On the Western Front
11. Hickey – Memoirs of a Georgian Rake
12. Wilkie Collins – Armadale
13. Schliemann – Troy and Its Remains
14. Runciman – The Fall of Constantinople 1453
15. Churchill – Great Contemporaries
16. Tolkien – The Fellowship of the Ring

Well, I managed to read five Folios last year, so I'll take it easy on myself and target six for this year...

A rough list based on a glance at my TBR pile:

1. Ishiguro - The Buried Giant (already in progress)
2. Jerome - Three Men in a Boat
3. Carson - Silent Spring
4. Hoban - Ridley Walker
5. Child - The Killing Floor
6. Steinbeck - East of Eden
7. King - Misery
8. Cain - The Postman Always Rings Twice
9. Pasternak - Doctor Zhivago
10. Atwood - Oryx and Crake

You might therefore expect many of these editions to appear on my blog over the course of the next year.

I have a similar approach to >5 Pendrainllwyn:, I rarely plan more than 1 or 2 books ahead.
There are still a few volumes that I'm likely to read this year.
1. Moonraker (My yearly bond read)
2. To kill a mockingbird
3. If this is a man

>2 PartTimeBookAddict:
Well, #2,5,6 and 10 are all modest reads. Actually the outlier for me is #7 Ring of the Nibelung.
I intend to listen as I read, so I may infact read this concurrent with others, but over a much greater time frame.

I also don't plan too far ahead - I always look at my shelves and change my mind, sometimes several times before actually settling on one. But since I read only one of my FS books last year, I have pledged to myself to read many more this year. We'll see how that goes.

>4 Willoyd: Thanks. I'm hoping to get into Burton this weekend and get cracking.

I also intend to make a start on my unread ML and LOA volumes this year too.

>5 Pendrainllwyn: Good points. My list isn't meant to curtail other reading, or to be read consecutively, merely these are ones I want to knock off this year.

>12 LesMiserables: off on a tangent, but did you see the marvellous production of the Ring at QPAC recently? Absolutely jaw-dropping…

I’m so glad I bought the Folio Ring in a sale 3 years ago - I intend to do exactly the same as you this year, follow the libretto while listening to Solti’s 1966 version on Spotify

Also, yes! The List. Some read before, none in Folio format...

The Living Mountain
Anna Karenina
The Shadow of the Wind
Titus Alone
The Day of the Jackal
All Hell Let Loose
Madame Bovary
Wolf Hall
Creators, Conquerors and Citizens
The remaining Earthsea books

>16 plasticjock: No I didn't due to commitments versus length of production.

My Folio reading target for this year is to get through the following:

Paradiso
The Hound of the Baskervilles
A Hero of Our Time
Oliver Twist
Eugene Onegin
All 3 books of the Jeeves short stories
Notes from the Underground (from the Best Short Stories of Dostoyevsky)

I only have four unreads from Folio, of which I suppose the biggest is my new A Bright Shining Lie. So I'll take care of that while grazing through some re-reads.

>1 LesMiserables: ...I'm limiting myself to 10 books...
...3v...
...2v...
...3v...
...3v...

I see the good old FSD tradition of sneaking extra books into limited lists is alive and well )
From your list, I haven't read a single title yet, but I do own the Pepys set, the Eusebius, and the British Myths (the quarter leather single volume edition), as well as Vita Nuova (but in a different edition and language). From time to time I get an itch to acquire The Anatomy of Melancholy set, but never quite sure whether I'd read it. I guess one day I should do a little research, pull it up on Project Gutenberg and read a few random passages to get a feel for what to expect.

>5 Pendrainllwyn: I too don't plan my reading, and I agree that it's one of life's pleasures to browse your library to pick the next book to read. Sometimes I pick a book just like that, depending on what I feel like reading at that particular moment. Sometimes I pick a book because of another book I was just reading. For example, right now one of the books I'm reading is FS Strange Defeat, which I picked on the back of Slightly Foxed Sword of Bone. Sword of Bone is great as a first hand account of being in Northern France from the start of the Phoney War to Dunkirk evacuation. I was hoping Strange Defeat would give an explanation of the total collapse of the French and English armies in Belgium described in Sword of Bone, and it already did in the first half of the book. Similarly, something I watched, a conversation, etc. might spark an interest in a particular topic or a book.

>21 elladan0891: I see the good old FSD tradition of sneaking extra books into limited lists is alive and well

I had hoped that it would go unnoticed. :-)

I might have to put The Book of the New Sun on my "definitely read" list for the year.

I read Scott Sumner's movie reviews regularly (whatever you think of his economic views, his movie reviews are excellent). He also mentions books on occasion, and recently said this about his recent reading:

I hugely enjoyed a long string of Gene Wolfe novels (the 4-part Book of the Long Sun and the 3-part Book of the Short Sun.). In general, I don’t read much sci-fi. For recent writers, I lean toward people like Sebald, Pamuk, Bolano, Marias, Knausgaard, Murakami, Houllebecq, etc. Gene Wolfe is the only sci-fi/fantasy writer that I would put in that class.

Rather than setting an anticipated total number, I am engaged in a year-long coordinated read/study of War and Peace plus a monthly chosen book. This is coordinated by an acclaimed author and Professor via regular Zoom meetings as a sort of digital book club. An occasional classic film is also scheduled. I am in an area with very few readers so I found that this brings some community.
In-between my unread FS books will be given a go as time allows.

Most of my Folios are wrapped in anticipation of a move, but I recently got A Dance to the Music of Time, and plan to read one novel each month. I have half a dozen of the novels as first editions, but where I don't I will read the more awkward Folio volumes, and regardless will be looking at Folio's corresponding plates which add to the reading pleasure. I must say, after a doubtful start I have very much warmed to Powell. I also intend reading Roadside Picnic, The book of the New Sun, Doctor Zhivago, and The Living Mountain. The rest of my reading will probably be outside Folio's list, but who knows – the unexpected is one of the delights of the reading life.

MID-YEAR CHECK-IN!

How is everyone doing with their list so far? I've been pretty miserable.

My original list:
1. The Living Mountain
2. The Mystery of the Yellow Room
3. Melmoth the Wanderer
4. Anna Karenina
5. Mr. Rabbit’s Symphony of Nature
6. Manhattan ’45
7. Shah of Shahs
8. The Black Tulip
9. Towers of Trebizond
10. Period Piece
And I hope to finish working my way through the Evelyn Waugh Comedies box set as well.

AND...

So far I've only read "Symphony of Nature", "A Handful of Dust" from the Waugh set and half of "Manhattan '45". Time for me to step it up!

>27 PartTimeBookAddict: Yep, I also definitely need to step it up! My excuse is a combination of “life” and getting distracted by other tempting reads, like new releases and interesting second hand bookshop finds!

Original list:
1. Dune (read book x2 but not my FS!)
2. Cider for Rosie (have read the sequel)
3. The Castle (last of my Kafka’s)
4. Oliver Twist (III Nonesuch)
5. The Good Soldier
6. Lucky Jim
7. The Fatal Shore
8. The Blind Watchmaker
9. Doctor Thorne
10. Tarka the Otter

Progress:
- The Fatal Shore (I loved this - harrowing but wonderfully written.)
- just started The Good Soldier

Err, that’s it so far. Gulp.

Although I have also read the Folio edition of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. Whoops, should have consulted my list of promises.

>28 Jeremy53: Not bad. Summer is the perfect time of year for "Cider with Rosie".

>27 PartTimeBookAddict:

My original list, with current status:
Paradiso - DONE
The Hound of the Baskervilles - JULY
A Hero of Our Time - DONE
Oliver Twist - ALMOST DONE
Eugene Onegin - DONE
All 3 books of the Jeeves short stories - HALFWAY DONE
Notes from the Underground (from the Best Short Stories of Dostoyevsky) - SEPTEMBER

I’ve also finished some not on the original list:
And Then There Were None
The Mystery of the Blue Train
The Murder at the Vicarage
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
True Grit

And am halfway through The Sun Also Rises.

So I feel pretty good about my Folio reading this year so far.

Didn't set a goal, but happy to have finished:

Steppenwolf
A Bright Shining Lie
Origins of Totalitarianism

Currently reading Fathers and Sons.

Will push myself to crack open Long Walk to Freedom & Orwell Life in Letters before the year is out.

Finished...

Something Wicked This Way Comes (Folio 2019)
Killing Floor (Folio 2020)
The Tombs of Atuan (Folio 2022)
Life, The Universe and Everything (Folio 2014)
Oryx and Crake (Folio 2019)

...with two more nearing completion, so will have to bump my modest six Folio target to at least twelve.

>32 HonorWulf:
You have trouble with the stamping of Something Wicked This Way Comes too ?

>30 jsg1976: You're in the lead. Well done!

What did you think of A Hero of Our Time? I read it last year and really enjoyed it.

>34 PartTimeBookAddict: I read Eugene Onegin (FS), A Hero of Our Time (FS), and Fathers and Sons (LEC) back to back, for a trifecta of Russian literature. Of the three, I have to say that Hero was my least favorite, both as a story and as a book. It just didn’t click with me for some reason.

>35 jsg1976: Not as strong as those other two, but I love the duelling scenes and the fatalistic, rebellious youth.

>33 Ragnaroekk: Not that I can see! Was there a particular defect with this book?

>37 HonorWulf:
The printed design from the artist is rubbing of and smears the yellow cloth the book is bound in, which is absolutely sad, because it's such a gorgeous book.

No target here. I have just started my 17th FS read for the year (47th book this year all told). For me, FS highlights this year have been

- A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings. The books are beautifully presented and they are a fun read. I haven't watched the TV series and they give me something to talk to my daughter about! I've just started the third book, A Storm of Swords.
- The Hobbit. Wonderful to read again after a gap of over 40 years. Probably the least impressive from a physical perspective.
- The Color Purple
- Shackleton's Boat Journey - my favourite of all of them.
- The Postman Always Rings Twice. For some reason I wasn't expecting too much. It over-delivered.
- Childhood's End
- Their Eyes Were Watching God - even better than The Color Purple.

The only FS book I didn't enjoy this year was Invisible Cities. Others here have loved it. A few things resonated but overall I fear I missed the point.

>38 Ragnaroekk: Ah, that's a shame! Fortunately, didn't have any rubbing off on my copy and I read it end-to-end.

No target, but fewer than I thought so far...

- The Moonstone LE
- The Shadow of the Wind LE
- On the Origin of Species LE
- The Shining
- The King of Elfland’s Daughter LE
- Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Revisiting this dream from earlier in the year. Ha ha, same old same old: I've read 30 books this year and just started my first on my list above.

I never learn. No matter, all of this will be a distant memory come January when I dream up a new one.

Update on original list…

…yeah, reading choices really are changeable aren’t they?

I’ve really had to remind myself of this list and throw them in there…

1. Dune (read book x2 but not my FS!) - not read yet. Definitely plan to in December when on leave
2. Cider for Rosie (have read the sequel) - Read! Loved it. A little creepy in one bit though…
3. The Castle (last of my Kafka’s) - unread
4. Oliver Twist (III Nonesuch) - unread
5. The Good Soldier - read! Didn’t love it. An odd book…
6. Lucky Jim - unread, but another December one
7. The Fatal Shore - read! Incredible
8. The Blind Watchmaker - just started reading
9. Doctor Thorne - unread, very unlikely this year
10. Tarka the Otter - read! Didn’t like it much at all…like the nature channel but tedious and lacking heart

>43 Jeremy53: Yes, indeed. Since >42 LesMiserables: I've actually been on a bit of a streak in completing some books. Ironically, none from my original list.

>43 Jeremy53: I'm up to 12. Hope to finish at least 2 more by the end of the year.

>44 LesMiserables: 😄

Final month push!

Of my original list I have read:
The Living Mountain
Mr. Rabbit’s Symphony of Nature
Manhattan ’45
Period Piece

Will finish:
Shah of Shahs
The Mystery of the Yellow Room
Towers of Trebizond

And to roll over into 2025:
The Black Tulip
Melmoth the Wanderer
Anna Karenina

>47 PartTimeBookAddict: Not on my list but ⅔ of the way through Scott's Ivanhoe. Blissfully off piste.

I think given my poor showing this year, I think I will be much more Modest in my Folio Society read target for 2025.

Maybe 1 set only.