This morning, somewhat against my better judgment,[1] I ran the New Year’s Day Dash, a 5-mile (road) race. Thanks in part to a few friends pacing me the first mile and a half (or perhaps I mean letting me hang with them before they took off), I finished in 40:34, a personal best and about a minute faster than my time last year. Perhaps that will be auspicious.
Everyone has been posting about their New Year’s Resolutions: go to the gym, lose ten pounds, eat healthy, get eyebrows under control. Some good ideas, some not so good. Well, I already go to the gym and I don’t really want to lose any weight, and my eyebrows are a lost cause. Instead, I’ve been thinking about books.
I read a lot. But after Goodreads sent me an email congratulating me on reading three books last year, I started going through my records and memory, as best I could, because surely that couldn’t be accurate. And, luckily (surprise), it wasn’t. I just didn’t review everything I read.[2] But I also have a bad habit of reading in parallel, so I might get halfway through something, then put it down and not come back for a year. Also, I read a lot of books for work–last year, I edited books on topics ranging from screenwriting to the rhetoric of the gross anatomy lab to Asian philosophy to nursing. So if I feel like I read constantly, it’s because I do . . . but it’s not always reading for pleasure.
Having come to this determination, I have made a list of books I want to read in 2015. As a writer, it helps to keep the mind fresh, and I begin to find that it’s important to find an escape from the grind of reading to edit, which is a different type of reading. I have to shut down that part of my brain sometimes. There’s no theme to these books, other than for most of them I saw reviews in different publications and found them interesting, and they’re in no particular order. I can’t guarantee I won’t get distracted or add or subtract from the list, but I’ll see how far I can get with it. My other resolutions are to finish reading/blogging about Ulysses, remember to water the plants in my office, and get my SADs under control. Let’s do this!
- Hawksmoor, by Peter Ackroyd Review
- The Southern Reach Trilogy: Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance, by Jeff VanderMeer
- Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell
- Tender is the Night and The Crack Up, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (maybe)
- Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie
- A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, by Eimer McBride
- Island, by Aldous Huxley (maybe)
- Viviane, by Julia Deck
- Without You, There Is No Us, by Suki Kim
- The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, by Michael Chabon Review
- Relentless Forward Progress, by Bryon Powell
- Dune, by Frank Herbert
- Gligamesh, by the people of Babylon
- The Way of Kings, by Branden Sanderson
- Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer
- Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir, by Lauren Slater (maybe)
Blind Descent, by James M. TaborReview- Rock ‘n’ Roll, by Tom Stoppard
- Blueshift, by Claire Wahmanholm (a pre-publication copy kindly provided by the author)
- I’m not going to say I’m going to read Being and Nothingness, by Jean-Paul Sartre, but every year this time when my SADs get bad I try to.
Are you reading anything interesting next year? Or, alternatively: Any other resolutions?
You can check out book reviews I’ve posted here on the book review and book reviews tags, because apparently I suck at metadata. Also check out the writing category for reviews of films, plays, and other stuff (I promise most of it is not bitching about how difficult it is to write a novel).
[1] Against my better judgment ought to be the title of my blog sometimes. This particular race was against my better judgment because it was cold and I was up late the night before and also I have some tendonitis in my ankle.
[2] I usually only put reviews on Goodreads if I’ve written a review of them, and I only do that when something interesting strikes me about the books to write about.