The serendipity of keeping a diary

Ian MacDonald

In December 2006, I moved with my wife from Berkeley, Calif., to her native Sri Lanka. This year, my reading was largely determined by what I happened to find on my bibliophile father-in-law’s bookshelves.

In 2007, after years of good intentions, I began keeping a diary, so it wasn’t entirely by chance that I picked up The Assassin’s Cloak: An Anthology of the World’s Greatest Diarists (Canongate).

This fascinating book brings together diary excerpts from Queen Victoria to Anais Nin, John Wesley to Charles Darwin, Lord Byron to Noel Coward, and Beatrix Potter to Andy Warhol. What makes the book all the more appealing is how it’s arranged: not by year but by day, beginning Jan. 1 and ending Dec. 31.

Another fortuitous encounter was Tom Holland’s Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic (Abacus), which caught my eye because I am currently translating Nanami Shiono’s best-selling 15-volume history of Rome, Romajin no Monogatari. Rubicon is a vivid and captivating account of patriotism, treachery and everyday life during ancient Rome’s slide from republicanism to autocracy.

Lastly, this year I reread Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, certainly one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, which moved me even more than when I first read it 20 years ago.

And how’s this for serendipity (a word, incidentally, that originates in the name for the teardrop-shaped island where I currently reside): I finished reading it on my 39th birthday, the same age as Waugh’s narrator Charles Ryder, who poignantly writes: “Here at the age of thirty-nine I began to be old. I feel stiff and weary in the evenings and reluctant to go out of camp...”

MacDonald is an award-winning translator whose recent works include “The Curious Case Book of Inspector Hanshichi” by Kido Okamoto (University of Hawaii) and the just-published “The Budding Tree: Six Stories of Love in Edo” by Aiko Kitahara (Dalkey Archive).

The Daily Yomiuri