Tuesday, March 19, 2013

A collection of goals

Recently, I was chatting with some of my good friends from book club when one of them mentioned a goal she had set. She mentioned that her goal for year was to read all of the books on her shelves that she had never read. As she explained this goal, I thought a lot about it and even considered switching to that from my current reading goal, which is to read a book a week. I decided, though to try for 52 books in 2013. We'll have to see how that goes!

Our conversation did inspire me to think more about the collection that I have been growing on my shelves over the years. At first, I didn't think I had all that much. Then, I took a walk...

I found quite the little stack of unread books in my Immigrant Lit/Scandinavian collection. Some of these were a gift from my college roommate, after she completed her Nordic Lit class. This stack is going to be pretty challenging - it was one thing to get reading done in college, and its something quite different to come home and read Finnish epic poetry after a full day at the office.

I then moved on to the living room, to the shelf where I usually keep the books I've bought but have not yet had the chance to read. Here's a nice big pile. I should have included something in this photo to show scale - that Truman book's spine is about 3 inches tall. And it's just barely the tallest one!

Just when I thought I had seen everything, I realized that I had even more! This should be the easiest stack to get through - although Something Dangerous is apparently the second book in a series and I haven't read and don't own the first one. Whoa!

When I realized there are 19 books already here that I haven't read, I've decided to set a new goal: one book from the collection in each of the remaining months of the year. So, hopefully by the time 2014 gets here, there will only be 10 books hanging around! Wish me luck!

No comments:

Post a Comment