Good afternoon constant reader.
My new reading challenge for 2013 and beyond, as there is no way on earth I could read every unread book I own in one year.
Well I could, if I didn't go anywhere else, or sleep.
The genesis of this came about through a chat I was having with a friend on Facebook.
It went like this:
"I've got such a back log. I have no
business buying more books for like a year...like that's going to
happen. However, I've been tempted to challenge myself and see how
long it would take me to read everything I have that's unread.
Wow.
You should do that, keep a journal, and then turn your experiences
into a book deal!
Hmmm, that's an idea...I've got a
moleskin journal that's begging to be used for something just like
this. I've got well over 100 books here unread. What a neat concept.
I see it as something along the lines of the Julie and Julia book/film, Julie cooking
all the Julia Child recipes and keeping account of her success and failures."
Thus my reading challenge was born.
Instead of keeping track of it on Goodreads, I'll keep track of it here.
I doubt I'll be as anal about entering what page I'm on, but I'll make entries when I start a book, how it's coming along, if it has made it pat the Page 50 point, and when I've finished.
You may well wonder how I decide what to read.
Do I just pluck a book off the shelf? Well...yes, but I've made a pattern out of it.
The first book I chose, I picked off the bottom shelf. Bottom shelves are horribly ignored and always dusty, so that's where I chose to start.
I picked Thomas William Simpson's The Editor.
It was a fair thriller. I had part of it figured out about a third of the way through. I thought Simpson's The Hancock Boys was better.
The second book has come from the fourth shelf.
(The next from the third, the next from the second, etc, when I've read a book from the first shelf, I'll start form the bottom and work my way up. Why? When my ultimate goal is to read everything, does it matter what shelf it comes from? It doesn't. It's me being idiosyncratic, and it helps me stay on task.)
Currently I'm reading 20th Century Ghosts, by Joe Hill.
Joe is Stephen King's son and he's a very good writer. I've read his two novels, Heart-Shaped Box and Horns. I liked them both a lot. This is, by it's very title, a collection of ghost stories. So far, I like what I'm reading and I'm on page 56.
Bear in mind I'll also be reading review books at the same time...so who knows how long this is going to take?
But it is reading.
It's what I do.
