Where Memory Fails, a Booklist Rarely Falters

 By Karen Jamal

A scribbled list, started as a New Year’s resolution 25 years ago, became a hardened habit. What secrets does a personal reading catalogue reveal?

The year after I graduated from university, with the reality of life after a literature degree stretching before me, I started a spreadsheet with the simplest of data points: date, author, title, and a rating out of 10.

I was feeling anxious about my future. Throughout that last year of my degree, I would visit the bathroom of the local library and stare at the graffiti above the toilet paper dispenser. “Arts degrees: Please take one.” It felt prescient.

I spent more hours that year working part-time jobs—swirling soft-serve ice-cream and stuffing envelopes—than sitting in the library. I often found myself burning the midnight oil before an exam to finish something I’d never have plucked from the shelves for pleasure. As I ploughed through John Milton’s interminable Paradise Lost and Aphra Behn’s mercifully short Oroonoko I worried about my own uncertain future, not the literary past.

So, after stashing away the scroll of paper that validated three years of study, I settled on a New Year’s resolution that would reconnect me with my love of books. Standing on the doorstep of adulthood, I needed a goal. Reading one book each week seemed aspirational, but achievable.

That was 1995, and in the 25 years since, I’ve created a personal reading history that is among my most treasured possessions.

For the first few years, the spreadsheet was a simple list scribbled in the back of my diary, each entry marked out in different colored ink. The first? “1 January 1995, Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre, 10.”

Long before big data loomed large, my booklist was torn out each year and stuffed into a manila folder, marked “Karen’s Book List.” Some years my tally would cover several pages; other years, I fell far short of my 52-book target.

A few years into the reading record, I transferred my handwritten lists into an Excel spreadsheet, applying filters to make sorting simple and adding a code so I could easily track my annual total.

With just three clicks, I can tell you that I’ve read 12 books by Julian Barnes, that my favorite novel by Jeanette Winterson is The PowerBook, and that I consumed 57 books in 2001. If you were to ask for recommendations to keep you company while in coronavirus lockdown, I can comply with ease.

But, like any good data scientist, I can also dig up more detailed insights.

There’s the Great Charles Dickens Reading Frenzy of 1998, when David Copperfield (score: 10), Bleak House (9.5), Little Dorrit (8), Dombey and Son (7.5) and Hard Times (4) were all devoured in six short weeks, but with diminishing levels of delight.

There are the desperate stakes of trying to hit my annual target at the death knell of the year. Take the year 2000, in which slimline novellas feature in the last weeks of December (Duras, Margaret, The Lover, 6; Nin, Anais, Seduction of the Minotaur, 7; and Mitford, Nancy, The Pursuit of Love, 7).

My evolution as a reader is all there in black and white. In 1995, the idea of being able to move through time, space and gender was deeply satisfying (Woolf, Virginia, Orlando, 9.5). Twelve years later, I felt that the original spirit of Orlando had run out of steam, and revised my rating down to 6.5.

But hidden within the list are secrets of my own personal history that no database can reveal. There’s the chain of faded flotsam and jetsam I picked up while passing through backpackers’ hostels (Joyce, James, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 6.5, swapped for Donleavy, J. P., The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B, 6.5), or in overseas secondhand bookstores where the English-language section was slim pickings (Fielding, Helen, Bridget Jones’s Diary, 7.5).

There are the late nights nursing a newborn, watching the windows whiten at dawn (Frazier, Charles, Cold Mountain, 9) or of the last days of pregnancy, wanting to shut out the world with a book, any book (Christie, Agatha, Death on the Nile, 6).

Then there’s the deep delight that rereading sometimes brings. Helene Hanff’s 84, Charing Cross Road scored just 7 in 2000, but a respectable 8.5 a few years later after I’d lived in London and trudged down that very street to catch the Tube each day.

The lean years for literature are tracked, too. In 2010, I had three small children, and my best chance for reading was found each night in the bedroom of a squirming six-year-old (Rowling, J. K., Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, 8).

My book list remembers these things. It records the mediocre months where nothing was rated above a 5 (June 1997), and the salad days when I flew through The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Emma and Tess of the D’Urbervilles in the same month (all 10 out of 10).

Any good data scientist would spot immediate problems with my silo of statistics, though. Five years ago, I carelessly spilled a cup of tea over my laptop and immediately heard the fizz and crackle of the hard drive dissolving. I hadn’t backed up my data for months. As my client work and invoices sizzled, I had a singular thought: “My booklist!” It took weeks of forensic investigation to recreate the lost records. And the dirty data is evident in that section: too many entries in 2015 start on the first of the month. It’s an imperfect list, but it is true to life.

Today, a quarter of a century on from that very first entry, I now pester my eldest son to start his own spreadsheet. He is dubious. “I’ll always remember what I read and what I thought,” he says with the brash confidence only possible in a sixteen-year-old boy.

But twenty-five years of collecting and cataloguing tells me a different truth. Where memory fails, a booklist rarely falters. 

Karen Jamal’s childhood was spent reading Enid Blyton by torchlight and learning “Jabberwocky” by heart. She spent nearly a decade in academia, studying the Brontës and Dickens, before descending from her ivory tower to write for industry publications.