What I read in the Year 2003

In 2003 I was working, had three children at home, and obviously because I was slightly demented, decided to take an Open University Course in Nineteenth Century Literature. I got an Open University degree in Humanities with Literature (mainly history, religion and English Literature) which took me fifteen years but those were the days in which it didn’t cost that much to study (about £400 per year if I remember correctly) – I wouldn’t do it now. I really enjoyed catching up on the things that I didn’t do at university where I studied economics in the vain hope that it would one day be useful for a career in business management – it wasn’t.

As a result of studying and reading some very long books I read fewer books than in 2000-2002. I read 249 books in the year and the months of September (ten books) and October (eight books) are the months in the last 25 years in which I have read the fewest books. Books included in my course that I read this year include – Jane Eyre (not a favourite of mine), Far from the Madding Crowd (too melodramatic), Germinal (an amazing discovery that I found absolutely captivating), Dracula (which was a lot less of a horror book than I had imagined), The Awakening (about which I can remember very little now except that I didn’t hate it), Northanger Abbey (not my favourite of Jane Austen but a good read anyway) and Middlemarch (which I enjoyed and have reread since – see a review here of a book linked to the classic). There are a lot of pages to be read in those novels and the writing style means that I tend to read them more slowly than modern books. At this date I would have been reading them on paper too and small print size never helps speed of reading.

The first book I read in the year was Last Train to Memphis by Elizabeth Peters. I own most of this author’s work and have blogged previously about her Amelia Peabody books (see here). This book is one of another series with a heroine, Vicky Bliss, who works in a German museum and gets involved with the theft of antiquities and also with an enigmatic young man who turns out to be a thief. They are great fun to read and this one is near the end of the series and is very satisfying for a fan (start the series with Borrower of the Night).

The last book I read in the year was Dead Men’s Wages byLilian Pizzichini which is a biography of the author’s father who was a con man operating in London in the twentieth century. She holds nothing back in her depiction of her father and his life and it’s an interesting bit of social history. I appear not to own this book any longer but I might reacquire it if I see it anywhere.

I notice that I didn’t use the library at all in 2003 and I recorded my reading in the back of the notebook that I used for 2002. I read a lot of crime from the cosier end of the spectrum in this year including works by Marian Babson, Margery Allingham, Charlotte Macleod, Robert Barnard, Sharyn McCrumb, Paula Gosling, Michael Gilbert, Lindsey Davis and Margaret Maron. I still read and reread novels by most of these authors even now. I suspect that they made an interesting contrast with the classics that were taking up so much of my time.