2010

Only a few hours away from the end of the year now.  Tough year for me, and I think for most people generally.  Perhaps not the best year to start blogging about one's mundane reading habits, especially since it took this one so long to actually finish a book.  And, truth be told, I only completed reading 24 books.  Still, that was an improvement over the previous year, so I have made some headway.  I started the year with A. S. Byatt's Possession and ended with Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, which makes me seem like some cozy Victoriana nerd, but the year also had some Philip K. Dick (A Scanner Darkly), David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, and Justin Cronin's vampire apocalypse epic The Passage.  I also read some Richard Yates, J. D. Salinger, and a lesser Dumas work.  Jumping all around, as is my usual.

If all works out, my first book of 2011 will be Lev Grossman's The Magicians, and it seems to be a good read so far.  I've managed to get about 60 pages in in roughly a day, so I am hoping to capitalize on that momentum.  I have fond memories of the time when getting 100 pages from the end of a book meant that there is a good chance I would finish it that night, but that was in the carefree days before I had much internet access.  And no podcasts, either, which tend to occupy my train rides.

So, what is the book-related resolution for my 2011?  I could tackle one of the 1000+ page doorstops in my possession:  Infinite Jest, A Suitable Boy, A Glastonbury Romance, or second stabs at War and Peace, and Les Miserables (actually, that would be third stabs, on both).  Maybe I should just try to work in an extra book a month, and shoot for 36 over this year's 24.  Maybe it should be page related-get a certain page count per day.

Maybe I should make decisions like this before I post...

Anyway, see you in 2011.  It will be better than 2010, I know it will.