![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
taerowynI never mentioned it because it wasn't really an official New Year's Resolution, just something I'm trying and since we're six weeks into the year and I'm still on track...
Anyway, like my last semester in school, I've decided I'm not allowed to buy any new books until I finish reading the ones I already own that I have yet to read. During my last semester, I applied an expiration date of only a few months (ie the end of the semester). This time I'm going for a full year. My hope is that by the time the year is up, I won't have any unread books left.
This is helped by goal number two...to read a book a week all year. As I said, we're into week six and thus far I have read:
1. Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson: it's about how English developed as a language. It's got the Bryson touch, but somehow wasn't as appealing as some of his others. Possibly too dry a subject?
2. What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier by James Gleick: A collection of articles he wrote from the early nineties to about 2003 on computers, the Internet etc. Fun to read some of the "predictions," both those that proved true and those that didn't...yet.
3. Microserfs by Douglas Coupland: The choice obviously inspired by the previous book. I think this may be my favorite of his that I've read so far.
4. Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones: Good old teen-fantasy by the author of Howl's Moving Castle. This one was just as good, but in a different way. More of an urban fantasy than Howl's which was more fairy tale-esque (not that this didn't have fairy tale qualities)
5. In This Country by Aine Greaney: A collection of personal essays about one woman's experience coming to America as an illegal immigrant from Ireland in the 1980s. She has good voice, but the one drawback was that this was a vanity self-published book...as evidenced by the woeful copy-editing job.
6. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut: This is part of my efforts to read a bit more actual Literature (capital L). I just finished it today. Still not sure what I think about it. I know lots of people love, love, love it. I'm just kind of...meh. Maybe it needs to percolate in my brain a bit more...or be re-read. We'll see.
So yeah...hopefully I'll have entries like this every couple of weeks, keeping track. I'd ask for suggestions on what to read, but I'm not allowed to buy anything new. I'm also going to allow books that I reread to count so I can take a break from the "must read my unread books!" mission every once and awhile and revisit some old friends.
Anyway, like my last semester in school, I've decided I'm not allowed to buy any new books until I finish reading the ones I already own that I have yet to read. During my last semester, I applied an expiration date of only a few months (ie the end of the semester). This time I'm going for a full year. My hope is that by the time the year is up, I won't have any unread books left.
This is helped by goal number two...to read a book a week all year. As I said, we're into week six and thus far I have read:
1. Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson: it's about how English developed as a language. It's got the Bryson touch, but somehow wasn't as appealing as some of his others. Possibly too dry a subject?
2. What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier by James Gleick: A collection of articles he wrote from the early nineties to about 2003 on computers, the Internet etc. Fun to read some of the "predictions," both those that proved true and those that didn't...yet.
3. Microserfs by Douglas Coupland: The choice obviously inspired by the previous book. I think this may be my favorite of his that I've read so far.
4. Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones: Good old teen-fantasy by the author of Howl's Moving Castle. This one was just as good, but in a different way. More of an urban fantasy than Howl's which was more fairy tale-esque (not that this didn't have fairy tale qualities)
5. In This Country by Aine Greaney: A collection of personal essays about one woman's experience coming to America as an illegal immigrant from Ireland in the 1980s. She has good voice, but the one drawback was that this was a vanity self-published book...as evidenced by the woeful copy-editing job.
6. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut: This is part of my efforts to read a bit more actual Literature (capital L). I just finished it today. Still not sure what I think about it. I know lots of people love, love, love it. I'm just kind of...meh. Maybe it needs to percolate in my brain a bit more...or be re-read. We'll see.
So yeah...hopefully I'll have entries like this every couple of weeks, keeping track. I'd ask for suggestions on what to read, but I'm not allowed to buy anything new. I'm also going to allow books that I reread to count so I can take a break from the "must read my unread books!" mission every once and awhile and revisit some old friends.