proximoception

Final 2011 reading plan is 10,000 pages. This way I won't just read short books, and I won't be discouraged from reading individual stories and poems and whatnot; that way I can finish the Chekhov stories I've missed, which are scattered over a number of volumes. But what I read has to be complete in some sense, to count toward the total. I think the completed reading from 2010 ran to about 10,000, so this shouldn't be a strain. I'll have to keep track of what's read somehow; I should probably write down what page I'm at in the various books I'm still reading. Though I guess I could encourage myself to finish those books by including their whole page count toward the '11 total. These simple schemes get complicated fast.

Toying with requiring half that total come from the ten or twelve core authors. Yes, why not: half, 5000. Proust plus War and Peace and Anna Karenina would cover it. Or just Emerson's unabridged journals. Though neither of those projects is likely. And we'll make it the ten.

Strict enough to get you somewhere you wouldn't have by yourself, free enough that you don't fight or much regret the rules, is the idea.

What do I want to read at the moment? The Chekhov. Several Shakespeare plays. A long novel - I've missed those. Some Alice Munro, since she and Carson are the local powers. To help cope with my first Ontario winter (delightful so far, I've missed this kind of cold).

Maybe a lot of short stories at first, by random people, now I'm free to. Poems? Might drive me crazy to count little individual ones. Rule: they can only count if ten plus pages or in a sequence that is or as part of a collection.

Okay, party to go to.