50 books

Introduction

You know how on vacation you have so much more time to read? A few weeks ago, as we were driving from New York to Rehoboth Beach, and I was thinking of all those books sitting at my feet that I couldn’t read because it would make me carsick, an idea for reading one book a week just popped into my head. Inspired by the Visual Bookshelf function on Facebook, which reminds me of all the books I want to read but haven’t yet, this is a challenge to myself: I am going (to attempt, anyway) to read an average of a book a week for the next year. And since I want to give myself just a tiny bit of leeway in case this project is overly ambitious (OK, I pretty much already know it is) my goal is 50 books this year. One reason for committing to all this reading is because the list of what I want to read is constantly growing, while the amount of time I spend actually reading has been shrinking. The challenge also works in tandem with my current TV hiatus (currently derailed by the Olympics); movies and Jon Stewart don’t count. Since I first had this idea on July 26, and have actually been keeping up with the plan so far since then, I am going to back date the entries a bit and include the books that I’ve read since then. The official book-a-week challenge will run from July 26, 2008 until July 25, 2009. I am well aware that in addition to reading a lot more, I’m also going to end up paying more attention to my book choices (a lot less chick-lit, I am sure) so not to continually embarrass myself. Which is sort of the point.