Time for the latest reading resolutions!

Happy 1/1/11, everyone!

So I was mentally composing my reading resolutions post this morning, thought to check said resolutions against last year's, and then wondered why I should even bother presenting them as if they were something new:

. . .And in the same old same old department: I'm going to do my level best to read more books that I already own (or already have checked out from the library: 40 plus tenish, or have already preordered: five one) than acquire more. Truly, I have reached the point where I maketh myself sick and I must get it through my head that any new books I hear about in the coming months will still be available in 2011 2012, so why not wait until then to purchase them or get them from the library? I am going to grant myself permission to buy a few books for the Kindle simply because they won't take up any more space in the house and. . . more of the usual blah blah blah . . . 

But I did read Ulysses last year. And I did start The Reading Habits of Fictional Characters, although I have been majorly slack about keeping it up. I've now completed 40 books from the Fill in the Gaps project,  which started in April 2009, and would like to read at least 20 more by the end of 2011, most likely these:

The Children's Hospital. Chris Adrian
The House of the Spirits. Isabel Allende
The Adolescent or The Idiot. Fyodor Dostoevsky
Invisible Man. Ralph Ellison
The Hamlet. William Faulkner
Born in Exile. George Gissing
Far from the Madding Crowd or The Mayor of Casterbridge. Thomas Hardy
Transit of Venus. Shirley Hazzard
Shadow Country. Peter Matthiesson
John Adams. David McCollough
A Suitable Boy. Vikram Seth
Salzburg Tales or Letty Fox. Christina Stead
The Charterhouse of Parma. Stendhal
He Knew He Was Right and Is He Popenjoy? Anthony Trollope
This Real Night, Cousin Rosamund, Sunflower and The Sentinel. Rebecca West
The Waves. Virginia Woolf

I'm reading This Real Night and The Waves right now, so that's a start!

I'm going to remain impervious in the face of all reading challenges with one notable exception: I'm in the saddle for C.B.'s Western Read Along Challenge in May because I've noticed that anytime people blithely tell you they'll read anything, they'll usually qualify that almost immediately with an exception to westerns. And I know for a fact that westerns can be wonderful.

And in other genre reading, I expect to read more science fiction than I have in quite a while. My son requested and received several hard sci fi titles for Christmas and I doubt I can keep my greedy hands off them.

I really am going to try to keep my new purchases under control. Between the download-the-first-chapter-for-free feature on the Kindle (and not ordering the book until I'm ready to read it) and a change in ILL policy at the library, I'm hoping there won't be a need for very many purchases and the stockpiles around here won't continue to grow at abandon.