Saturday, February 21, 2015

Reading Goals for 2015

Last week, I blogged about what I read in 2014. This seems like a good point to write about what I want to read in 2015.

I definitely need to read more plays, just one would surpass the number I read last year.

I'd like to read at least seven books that are either collections of poetry or books about poetry.

I'd like to read more adult fiction this year, but I'm content with keeping that number vague. (Maybe I'll finally read Moby Dick. I feel like that would count as "more," even if the number of novels on my list didn't increase.)

I'd like to read at least one book by a Nobel-prize-winning writer whose work I'm not well-acquainted with. I tried this in 2013, and I took an alluring trip with Alice Munro's Runway. This was in spite of my general avoidance of short story collections and the accuracy of The Toast's "How to Tell if You are in an Alice Munro Story." ("Nothing has ever happened to you except one thing, decades ago.")

I'd like to read two Pulitzer-winning books, at least one of them fiction.

I'd like to start reading more internationally (excluding countries I already read from semi-regularly, e.g., Britain, Russia, France, Germany, Ireland, and Canada). This challenge is very much inspired by this woman's goal to read a novel for every country in the world. But I don't have the time or stamina to read 196 novels (give or take) in a year. Instead, I'd like to pick two countries (or possibly two cultures within a country/region) and read some work from them over the course of a year.

This year, I'd like to read literature from South Africa and Lesotho, focusing particularly (though not exclusively) on work relating to the Zulu people. If you have any suggestions, definitely let me know!

That all sounds a bit serious.

Here are my other, completely arbitrary, reading goals (click here for a larger view):

When it's from a site called "PopSugar," you know the list is going to be weighty with gravitas.
Some of these are so simple that I've zipped through at least a dozen goals already. But other challenges seem to have set me up for failure before I've begun. For example, the only book I've found so far by an author who shares my B.F.B. initials is a 19th century memoir of an American privateer (and no one is 100% sure who wrote it, so it's a stretch). And I didn't cry when I read The Fault in Our Stars, so obviously the answer to "a book that made you cry" is going to be "the book I accidentally smothered in raw onions."

I don't know that I'll be able to fulfill all these goals, but I'm definitely excited to try. What are your reading goals for the year?

1 comment:

  1. I like the idea of reading a novel from every country of the world. One of my all-time favorite place and time traveler novels is Pearl Buck's "The Good Earth.

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