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| The Ouija Board option! |
At the beginning of the year, I perused several articles on how to plan one's reading. I love these articles, because they have subheadings and bullet lists. Subheadings I'd like to see: "Color-Coded Genre Countdown!""The Ouija Board Option!" And I would enjoy a sidebar on essential oils to soothe the anxious reader. The typical reader apparently passes out on the fainting couch while choosing between Jane Eyre and The Man without Qualities.
On New Year's Eve, fretful readers pore over their book journals and spreadsheets, scribbling titles and authors in their planners, then crossing out Robert Musil several times, fiercely, because they do not want to read The Man without Qualities. (Nor do I.)
On New Year's Eve, many plans are made. But perhaps on New Year's Eve, you were partying at a literary bar or club - perhaps one mentioned in Jay McInerney's '80s classic, Bright Lights, Big City, or Natalie Standiford's 2020 debut novel, Astrid Knows All. I hope you didn't catch the virus.
Parties seldom go smoothly, planning one's reading goes even less smoothly. A few years ago I bought a planner at Target. I loved making checklists. Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman, 70 pages a day: no checkmark. Gun Island, Ghosh: no checkmark. Lucky Per: no checkmark. I did cross off Ludmilla Ulitskaya's Jacob's Ladder and Russell H. Greenan's The Secret Life of Algernon Pendleton. But the books I read were rarely on the checklist.
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| I loved this book. |
The other day I came across an old paperback copy of Antonia Fraser's biography of Mary Queen of Scots. I wonder, if I took a "Wikipedia refresher class" (depending on the quality of info), could I start in medias res? But I won't add it to the checklist.
Do you plan your reading or wing it? Everybody has a different system, or no system at all. I have a system, but it is sometimes no system.
I plan a bit, it's not graven in stone and I only have twelve this year. They vary from finish "Faerie Queene" by Edmund Spenser to read more Hardy. "Faerie is part read and progressing, if slowly, Hardy will have to wait, but other books on the list are being read. I'm a fright for reading 4 books simultaneously, but it keeps me engaged.
ReplyDeleteIt is always good to have a "finish" project, and I vaguely remember a "bower of bliss." It does seem that most of us read multiple books at one time these days.
DeleteIt is a problem for me. I use the teaching I volunteer for, the papers I volunteer and the classes I take to organize myself. The problem is often I want to read books that have nothing to do with anything anyone else in a group is interested in. I read several books at a time too.
ReplyDeleteYou read a lot for your work: that is understandable. Maybe a put-your-feet-up and read for entertainment once a week (or month)?
DeleteHello, Ellen.
ReplyDeleteI spend a year drawing up a list of thirty books that I have on my shelves or on my Kindle that I should read in the next year. I started doing this about fifteen years ago because I noticed that left to my own devices I would just default to rereading my favorite classics. I still do some rereading, but my list is there to remind me that there are other books besides the Forsyte Saga and everything written by Jane Austen.
ReplyDeleteI like the idea of your list. It's a balance: do I need to reread Jane Austen, or do I need something else? I try to keep up with more new books -always a resolution! - but did not keep my resolution last year. Well, there's always the future (the near future).
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