2010
For a new year's resolution in 2009, I recorded the title and author of every book I read. It led to the following observations:
No book was without merit but not all were genuinely satisfying
I spend too much time fulfilling obligations: books lent by friends, books bought on a whim, review copies, books related to school projects, etc. I want to be free to read what I want to read.
My reading is sometimes a passive, default activity.
I used to assume that one book would lead to a specific other. In 2009, however, my reading pattern was highly scattered: Book B is almost always unrelated to Book A. There is no natural emergence and certainly no design to what I read next. It's like I'm constantly clearing a backlog or indulging whatever pushes to the front of the queue.
I should use my limited reading time more deliberately.
As an experiment, I set myself a "prescribed reading list" for 2010: all my reading planned in advance for one year. It includes books for certain pleasure, books to fill cultural gaps, and two vacant slots to allow for drift.
Books for certain pleasure:
- Kurt Vonnegut - Galapagos
- Roald Dahl - Boy/Going Solo
- Philip K. Dick - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldridge
- Richard Brautigan - In Watermelon Sugar
- Haruki Murakami - Norwegian Wood
- P. G. Wodehouse - Very Good, Jeeves
- Momus - The Book of Jokes
- Momus - The Book of Scotlands
- George Orwell - Keep the Aspidistra Flying
- Charles Burns - Black Hole
Books I'm slightly ashamed not to have read by now:
- Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment
- Heller - Catch 22
- Debord - Society of the Spectacle
- Roth - Portnoy's Complaint
- Waugh - Vile Bodies
- Gray - 1984, Janine
- Atwood - The Blind Assassin
- Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
- James - The Turn of the Screw
- Dorothy Parker - Selected Stories
- Irving - A Prayer for Owen Meaney
- Sacks - The man who mistook his wife for a hat
- Twain - The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
- Larkin - Selected Letters
The "two" vacant slots:
- Walter Kirn - Up in the Air
- Haruki Murakami - Kafka on the Shore
- Haruki Murakami - After the Quake
- Grant Morrison - All Star Superman Vol 1
- Neil Gaiman - Whatever happened to the caped crusader?
- Haruki Murakami - South of the Border, West of the Sun
- Haruki Murakami - Sputnik Sweetheart
- Richard Herring - How not to grow up
- Stewart Lee - How I escaped my certain fate: the life and deaths of a standup comedian
- Timothy Eyre - North Korea 2002.
- Ian Macpherson - Confessions of a justified genius (Manuscript)
- Ian Macpherson - A very nautical boy (Manuscript)
- Dominguez and Robin - Your money or your life
- Richard Boston - Beer and Skittles
- Alain de Botton - Status Anxiety
- Alan Moore - Top Ten, Vol. 1