Saturday, January 10, 2009

Target practise

I was feeling reasonably proud of myself for reading 72 books + 3 audio books in 2008. That is until I heard about Sarah Weinman from the LA Times who got through an astonishing 462 books last year.

Now with ten days of the new year completed I have finally set my reading goal for 09 and once again it's 52 books in 52 weeks. I don't want to force myself to try and better last year's tally because I want to enjoy reading not worry about some arbitrary figure I've created for myself to achieve.

But within my target for 09 I have decided to put a few conditions to challenge my reading comfort zone. I was pretty appalled that my count of kiwi authors read last year was a measly four, so I plan to remedy that with a minimum of 10 New Zealand authored books read in 09. I also want to read at least three "classics." I've decided it's time to be a proper grown up and read (and hopefully enjoy) some Jane Austin and Emily Bronte.

So far I'm ten days and two books down so right on target with my reading and I'm off now to start on number three and my first of my kiwi authored novels.


2 comments:

Caffeinated Weka said...

That is still a pretty impressive reading goal. A problem I have with books I really enjoy is the dilemma of wanting to read more, but not quite wanting to reach the end too soon. I can't imagine reading 462 books in a year - how much enjoyment can you really get from that?

Scribbles said...

Hey hun,

For classics, I recomment "Tess of the D'Urbavilles" by Thomas Hardy (once you get through the first few chapters it gets quite scandalous), "The Mill on The Floss" by George Eliot and "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Bronte. "Vanity Fair" and "Lady Chatterley's Lover" also very good!