It started, this new year and decade, my reading that is, with the felicitious serendipity that always characterises my Sunday-amateurish reading. Dipping into Steven Moore’s The Novel: An Alternative History 1600-1800, which I haven’t read, but tasting its acerbic opinion thought it may be a good place to begin the year.

Sampling Primo Levi’s favourite texts in The Search for Roots, led swiftly to Robert Alter’s commentary and translation of Job, which holds the right of primogeniture in Levi’s anthology. It’s been my intention to read the Bible, as literature, more deeply, so I start the year with Job.

Characteristically though there are other texts clamouring for attention: Papini’s Dante (translated by Eleanor Hammond Broadus and Anna Benedetti), J. B. Leishman’s translation of the Duino Elegies.

As always I am curious to see where the year leads and determined, as Levi puts it, ‘to undermine’ my reading patterns and tastes: ‘a woodworm can find new timbers, or new sap in old wood’. Suggestions and ideas always welcome!

Happy new year to all who read my blog.