All through 2022, Toby Litt posted diary entries on a daily basis on his substack. He still does, and has over 1000 entries now.
The first year though was prewritten for the whole year, and published online daily, and then in book form on the first of January 2023.
It's an interesting experiment.
The story of this first year includes a birth and a death in the family. Otherwise it's lots of rumination about life, death, the art of writing, his desk, dust and pencil sharpeners; among other topics including the correct use of semi-colons.
Whilst it works relatively well on a one page a day basis, I'm not so sure about as a book.
There is some beautiful writing in here. Litt is a great writer of prose. he really knows how to craft a good sentence.
As a book though, it comes across as more a selection of essays than a novel. Some of them are more interesting than others. the two weeks spent discussing Keats for example, I only skim read, to make sure there were no notifications regarding the pregnancy or his mother's ill health hidden in there.
There are also days where he rambles quite incoherently.
I was hoping to hear more about his writing workshops which were a highlight in the early part of the book. Unfortunately, they kind of faded out after I'd gotten interested in their interrelationships in the class. They provided a continuity in the first half of the book that I feel was necessary. The second half of the year moves a lot faster because more of a narrative arc forms, with the later stages of the pregnancy and the declining health of his mother.
In those sequences, I could really get involved emotionally.
Overall I enjoyed reading it, but I definitely think it needed more of a narrative arc and less essays about dust. Even though the essays could be interesting (even the ones about dust), there were just too many of them which detracted from making this feel like a novel.
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