I’ve been quite busy the last few days, so there was no time for me to do an end-of-year roundup of all the books I’ve read, nor was there really time to let you know what I’ve got in store for the coming year. I’ll try to do both now.
Last year I launched a project called Reading 2007, for which I reviewed (well, sort of reviewed) every single book I read during the calendar year. I started out with the notion of doing serious reviews, but to be perfectly frank I don’t see this blog as that serious a thing, so they eventually became more like impressionist rambles inspired by the books. I only made it through fifty-three books during the year, well below my average, but adult life certainly takes its toll on both the energy and the free time. I did find, though, that the project made me more aware of how I was choosing my reading material, and how making that information public would affect (effect? I never get that right) how others saw me. I had a good time, and I learned some things, and reader response was generally positive. I also joined The Canadian Book Challenge (follow the link to see what that’s all about), which will continue probably well into the new year.
For the coming year, I’m going to do much the same, except of course I’m calling my major project Reading 2008. Here are a few of the titles I’ve got lined up:
- Dead Man’s Float, by Nicholas Maes (in progress)
- Spook Country, by William Gibson
- The Love of a Good Woman, by Alice Munro
- The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories, by Susanna Clarke
- Trouble is My Business, by Raymond Chandler
- The Gift, by Vladimir Nabokov
- Home Movies, by Ray Robertson
And of course there will be many more, both Canadian and not. There may even be some non-fiction in there, we’ll have to see. I’d like to say that I’d also like to get back into making more posts about critical theory, but I’ve made such promises in the past, and they bore no fruit. Better to say that they may happen, or they may not. I will be making some changes to the infrastructure and such, though, and hopefully as soon as next week. I’d like to add a search function (there used to be one, but it sucked and kept breaking, so I took it down), and I’d like to add a way to page backwards through the archives in a more reasonable fashion than just selecting a category and getting every entry on a single page. I’m sure it can be done fairly easily, but I just haven’t tried to wrap my head around it yet.
So best wishes for the new year to all of you, and thanks for reading.
