Sunday, January 06, 2013

You say you want a resolution

On New Year's Day I was still trying a psychic mind trick on the universe that would grant me a mulligan for the entire month of November, which I'm still harboring a few issues over missing, but now that that's obviously failed, I'm willing to move on. Forward!

2013! Nothing against you personally, but I'm going to do my best to ignore most of what you have to offer me until 2014, because I really need a catch-up year where my reading is concerned. It's going to be Eschew the New until the cows come home on December 31, 2013.

I'm going to read heavily from my Fill in the Gaps list and my Classic Club Challenge list and I'd like to mark the three Wilkes County titles off my Some Dark Holler list.

I'm also horrified by how little nonfiction I read last year and would love to read at least 15 from the list below:

Payback. Margaret Atwood
The Way the World Works. Nicholson Baker
How to Live, or A Life of Montaigne. Sarah Bakewell
The Passage of Power. Robert A. Caro
At Day's Close: Night in Times Past. A. Roger Ekirch
Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber 
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. Stephen Greenblatt
Why Orwell Matters. Christopher Hitchens
Votes for Women. The Virago Book of Suffragettes. Joyce Marlow, ed.
Destiny of the Republic. Candice Millard
The Return of the Chaos Monsters - And Other Backstories of the Bible. Gregory Mobley
The Map of My Dead Pilots. Colleen Mondor
A Collection of Essays. George Orwell
Nixonland. Rick Perlstein
Monster of God. David Quammen
The Song of the Dodo. David Quammen
Spillover. David Quammen
Iceland: Land of the Sagas. David Roberts
Hallucinations. Oliver Sacks
The Braindead Megaphone. George Saunders
Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded. John Scalzi
The Life of Elizabeth I. Alison Weir
The Essential Rebecca West.
The New Meaning of Treason. Rebecca West
A Train of Powder. Rebecca West
The Essays of Virginia Woolf, v. 6

8 comments:

  1. Of your list I've only read Debt, but I'd highly recommend it!

    I need a mulligan for the second half of last year (I even stopped updating my books read list in August) but am deciding to just start over again!

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  2. I think sometimes I need an Eschew the New resolution as well. I've even thought about not adding anything to my TBR list (including older books) for a whole year, just so I can make a dent. But I know it wouldn't work out. I'd have a lingering feeling that I'd missed something great. Limiting myself to 24 new releases in 2012 worked out great though!

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  3. I've been feeling much the same. It seems that regular readers, because we keep up with what's going on in bookstores and in the publishing world, are easily overwhelmed by all the new choices offered us each calendar year. It sure happened to me this year. I'm not going whole-hog, like you, but I am planning to cut way back on new books this year and concentrate on some of the ones I know I've missed from prior years and decades. So far this year, both my reads are from way back: 1987 and 2002.

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  4. I wish you well in this impressive listing of non-fiction items. I've read two of them [Payback, and How To Live] and both of them were GREAT! I think you'll really like them. Also, I have The Swerve on deck here, as you do -- for 2013.
    All the best to you.

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  5. Best of luck with your reading for 2013! I've heard the Caro books are divine. I think there are 3 or 4 now? I have some catching up to do. I've heard the author speak on Book TV several times and look forward to his work.

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  6. Does the fact that you have Woolf's sixth volume of essay here mean you've read the first five? I am green with envy. I have read all the letters and journals but haven't yet found the stamina for the essays. You inspire me!

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  7. Eschew the New, I like it! I need a resolution like that. Or rather I need to figure out how to keep that resolution. Good luck1 I hope you have a phenomenal reading year!

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  8. Destiny of the Republic is on my reading radar too. I've heard great things about it, so I put it on the list for my library's book group for this year (I'm totally mercenary and put the books I want to read on the list!) I read a bit of the first chapter a couple of months ago and I think it's going to be really good.

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