My New Year's Resolution? Read more - Ian McMillan

Each of them has taught me things about writing and reading and indeed about being alive and being human and how sentences and paragraphs can be engines that drive ideas and images and cultural possibilities.

Once I’ve finished reading their work (not all of it in Oates’s case; she’s written more 60 novels and 40 collections of short stories), I wander around thinking I’m living in their world, like I sometimes think I’m in a film when I come out of the cinema.

One of my producers on The Verb, not content with reading all those books for work, decided to embark on some readathons for fun, starting with War and Peace, Tolstoy’s epic work of, er, Peace and War, and Proust’s Remembrance of Times Past, a book so big that it’s rumoured to have its own postcode.

My resolution, then, for 2024, is to do more of these long reads myself, to find long books by writers who’ve written lots of them and at least start to chip away at the pile of words that will no doubt dominate my working hours.

I’m also going to try to read writers who aren’t with us any more because I’m aware that there are novelists from the 19th and 20th centuries who produced back-breaking quantities of books whose work I need to explore more fully.

The thing is, people who’ve read me for years, and I know there’s at least a minibus full of you, will be getting a sense that they’ve heard all this before.

Yes, but this time I really mean it. And yes, I said that last time.

Last time, a few years ago, I declared that I was going to read all the books of Charles Dickens because, although I’d read a few of them, and seen Oliver! a few times, and been scared out of my wits by Magwitch in the old black and white film of Great Expectations, I hadn’t read the whole lot.

Well, I can tell you that I read Hard Times and enjoyed it, and then I somehow got bogged down in The Old Curiosity Shop so much that I kept wishing it was closing time.

I challenged myself to look back at my Dickens resolution at the end of the year to see how well I’d done, but a book and a half didn’t really seem like enough at all.

Dickens is still on my list but I think I’ll start with DH Lawrence; he wrote quite a few books, including Sons and Lovers, Women in Love and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. They’re thick but they’re not too thick and the language in them isn’t so archaic as to make my head hurt.

Or I might start with the modernist’s modernist, Virginia Woolf; I’ve read To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway but there’s more, much more. Or how about George Orwell? Or Evelyn Waugh? Or…

Well, anyway; I’ll read one of them! Remind me that I said that, won’t you?