My Year of Books

It’s that exciting time of the year again where you get to reflect and plan for the next year. I say exciting because I get to let my optimistic side run wild. Intrigued?

Hello lovely readers, hope you had a nice Christmas/holiday. Like everyone would say, I can’t believe it’s the end of the year already! High time for reflection and all that, eh? My Substack inbox is full of emails from wonderful people I follow writing about their plans for 2024, and as I love reading them, I thought I’d add my own take to the mix.

December to me is quite a busy month, it’s the month of preparing for Christmas (from decorating the house to making Christmas cards, and of course cooking THE dinner, fortunately I always do a collaboration with my MIL where she’d do the meat and I’d do all the trimmings) and the month when I reward myself with just-because creative projects; one of those whose only purpose is to make me happy. It is one of the reasons why I haven’t been able to write much here, my apologies.

This month, my just-because creative project was making a little mouse doll made of wool felt from the book Luna Lapin. I have made several Lunas in the past, but I’d never made her friend Wilhelmina Souris before. She’s still naked for now, I still need to make her clothes. One of the things I love about making characters from the Luna Lapin books is that you can make a wardrobe full of fancy clothes for them if you want and as they’re small, they don’t require much fabric – for me, this means I can use leftover fabrics from my own dressmaking projects. Win win. Plus they are so adorable!  

Wilhelmina borrowing Luna’s dress. She’s not one to pose in the nude ha!

As my hands were busy making Wilhelmina, I got to think about the next year and my plans for it. I have this nagging feeling that the world is going to be even crazier in 2024, I wonder why (looking at you, America! And of course the UK’s general election). But, just because the world is going bananas doesn’t mean we have to let our personal lives be as bad, surely? For me, I’m planning to do what I always do; lose myself in rabbit holes of curiosity and creativity, in other words: a gazillion projects . I always get excited about projects, I am forever drawn to people who have passion projects, it makes them extra interesting to me. Even when their projects are not in my area of interest. I don’t know whether it is more due to the passion or the project itself, either way if one mixes the two, one becomes interesting – I don’t know why I started talking like royalty, maybe it’s the coffee... intoxicated by caffeine, is that a thing?

As the title of this post says, 2024 is going to be my Year of Books. I know what you’re thinking, there’s more to it than reading books; I will also be making books. Yes, MAKING books! How exciting is that! Sorry for the excessive enthusiasm there, I can’t help myself haha. So let me explain…

Just before Christmas, I came across a passionate bookbinder on YouTube by the name of Rachel Hazell or The Travelling Bookbinder. I was so intrigued. I have always loved books, I’m a bookworm, after all, but this is a different way of loving books. So I bought her book Bound where she guides you through 15 beautiful bookbinding projects. The book itself is so beautiful, her passions for books, paper, and her beautiful home of Edinburgh and the small Hebridean island of Iona shine though her words and breath-taking photographs. I adore the book and I jumped right into the first project the next day. The project was simple and it only required one A3 size paper of your own choice of weight – I used wallpaper lining paper for my experiment, this paper can hold watercolours or inks. The paper is then folded here and there, cut to make a slit, and voila, you have an 8 page book – a sketchbook, in my case. I decorated each page with random repeat patterns using a brush and colourful inks, it was such a quick, playful, and satisfying project. My mind is buzzing with plans and possibilities, I love it!

From this project, I learned about the term Artist Book. Not a sketchbook exactly, but the books made by artists as Art, whereas a sketchbook is a place where you test out ideas and techniques, a playground if you will, not necessarily an Art piece on its own though it can be. It’s fascinating the way people manipulate paper to turn into pages, and then play with it further to become something extra wonderful. So that’s the rabbit hole I’m going to explore next year. I’d like to try different bookbinding methods – there are 15 in the Bound book alone – and create a few artist books of my own in which I shall indulge my love for paints, inks, pencils, paper, fabrics, and threads. I’m so pumped just thinking about it! Needless to say, I will share my journey with you all here, I hope you’re intrigued.

Of course it is not a book year without a reading list, right? I love classic literatures and there are (embarrassingly) so many I have not had the pleasure of reading yet. In 2024, I want to read at least 10 classic literatures from this list. I compiled a list of 15 books, but I’ll be aiming for 10 as I do have other books to read from my book clubs, a Heinlein (I aim to read one of his each year) as well as keeping a bit of wiggle room for other books I may discover in the future. For now, here is my book list, not necessarily in order of reading plan:

1.     Gulliver’s Travels by Johnathan Swift.

2.     The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis.

3.     A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.

4.     I am a Cat by Sōseki Natsume. For someone who has a university degree in Japanese, I am embarrassed to say I’d never read their classic literatures. I am reading this in January – the English version as my Japanese is a bit rusty, just like my Indonesian haha.

5.     The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas.

6.     Watership Down by Richard Adams.

7.     Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë.

8.     Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier.

9.     Les Miserables by Victor Hugo.

10.  The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi – I happen to have an old beautiful copy of it from a lovely second-hand bookshop.

11.  Lost Illusions by Honore de Balzac.

12.  The Castle by Franz Kafka.

13.  Any Dostoyevsky – haven’t decided on which yet, more likely to be Demons. I’ve only read The Idiot so I have a few to choose from.

14.  Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. This is a lofty goal, I don’t know if I’d be able to do it, but I’m hoping by the end of the year my French will have been good enough to read the book. Fingers crossed.

15.  The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. In English this year, hopefully one day soon I’ll read the original Italian version.

Do you plan your reading like this? This is my first time coming up with a list of books to read for the whole year, it’ll be interesting to see if I could stick to the list – I am nothing if not impulsive, my getting lost in a bookbinding rabbit hole is a fine example of that. I may be overly optimistic, but hey ho… shoot for the stars and all that.

I’m also planning to visit places like this more often. By that I mean old book shops. They’re just magical!

So in the Year of the Books, I shall be writing about what I learn from the books I read as well as what books I make, how exciting! I’m really looking forward to the New Year, I hope you do too. In the meantime, have a wonderful New Year. Cheers.