By Emma Clayton

 

THIS year is going to be epic.

My New Year's resolution, I've decided, is to work my way through 'the classics' which could pretty much mean anything that isn't: a) an autobiography or b) a book you read by the pool on holiday, then instantly forget.

"Always have a novel on the go," my old college professor used to say. And whenever I've indulged in a celebrity memoir, or travelogue, I try and return to a novel. But, despite having an English degree, my reading habits these days aren't particularly highbrow - I'm more likely to choose a Richard and Judy Book Club favourite than a Dostoyevsky.

It's not that I read trash - I once tried Hollywood Wives, just for fun, and it was so awful I couldn't get beyond the first chapter - and I do slip in the occasional Thomas Hardy or Evelyn Waugh, but in the back of my mind lies the nagging feeling that there are many great books I simply haven't read. Glancing at a '100 Greatest Novels' list, I realised that while I’ve got quite a lot of them sitting on my bookshelves at home, I've only read a handful.

So now I'm aiming to plough through lofty tomes; David Copperfield to Don Quixote, Mrs Dalloway to Moby Dick. And, before 2016 is out, every word of War And Peace. "Why?" asked my colleague, with a grimace. Because if I'm challenging myself to read the 'classics' I can't ignore the daddy of them all.

York Press:

2016: the year to read all those great novels we've never got round to

If the lavish new BBC1 adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's epic is anything to go by, I might even enjoy it. Of course this scaled-down, sexed-up version is adapted by Andrew Davies, the man who made Pride and Prejudice racy thanks to Colin Firth and a wet shirt. I'm sure Tolstoy's 1,500-page novel - spanning eight years, with 300 characters, interspersed with historical essays and philosophical reflections on the nature of war - isn't quite so entertaining. But what an achievement if I actually managed to finish it!

Actor James Norton, whose brooding presence in the TV drama has had Twitter in raptures, describes War and Peace as an "incredible soap opera, relevant for today". It's essentially about love, conflict, power, sex and family - themes that have echoed through stories down the ages, from Shakespeare to Mills and Boon.

When it comes to reading habits, it's each to our own. Whether it's frothy chick-lit, complex thrillers or zombie graphic novels, it's okay because all books are great. Apart from Hollywood Wives.

It's not literary snobbery that drives me to read Tolstoy, Orwell or Proust - it's a need to find out what all the fuss is about and to decide for myself what I like.

To quote from War and Peace: "The strongest of all warriors are these two - Time and Patience.” Something tells me I'm going to need both.