The Hardy Spree and other stories

So utterly enamoured have I been with the recent Thomas Hardy season on BBC4 that I've been on a spree to fill in the other half of his complete novels with those lesser-known titles, some of which I've read, but I don't want to be incomplete. I think it's seven more to go with the seven already here. The Collected Stories and Complete Poems and two biographies are also here but I won't as yet stretch to The Dynasts although you never know.

It's like coming full circle. I can probably now identify The Woodlanders at school as being when Eng Lit became as much as a vocation as I've ever had, considering it a marvellous thing that reading such a book could be counted as 'work'. As with Mozart, one returns to where it all began with no loss of the original wonder one felt.

There have been any number of excursions on the way- Bach, of course, and Beethoven and Shostakovich registered their presences early doors before Buxtehude, Josquin and Handel all had their times and remain solidly Top 10.

Pop music inevitably takes one on a more more circuitous route until fading to leave one with a vast archive of masterpieces.

While several poets laid claim to one's admiration, poetry has also now apparently resolved itself into a personal helicon but my history of the novel can be defined by a list of those writers whose books I have 'just about' everything of- Joyce, George Eliot, Salinger, Julian Barnes, Murakami, Graham Swift, Gide. There's plenty of Balzac but life is too short and the house too small for all of it. Donna Tartt. Larkin and Sean O'Brien if it comes to that and, in fact, my uncle and father, too - with one title each, but that's not really the point.

The point, if there is one, that next year, maybe as far as Easter, is likely to be Hardy time, hoping that one novel after another doesn't leave me wondering what happened to a character that belonged in the book I finished the previous week.

Similarly, with the jettisoning of Radio 3 from my daily soundtrack in favour of my record library rather than the BBC's, I've been leaving the same disc in for half a dozen or so consecutive plays over a week or ten days. The Shostakovich String Quartets never stop giving of their wintry lyricism and ongoing invention. What a sensational investment they were. It will take something quite remarkable to knock them off the top of the playlist. That thing might be the Symphonies that I've mostly shied away from but it would be madness not to try them in due course.  

All of which makes for a fine, if sometimes austere outlook for the bleak midwinter and the natural break from the day job of local lunchtime concerts. One doesn't want to be left without reading matter to hand or essential music. Don't worry about me, though, I won't be.