A Book Post! Reading Plans for 2013

I read a lot last year, but didn't do a particularly good job keeping track, not nearly so well as 2011 (fiction and nonfiction) when I entered the 52 Books Challenge and kept track of all my reads on Goodreads. 

This year I would like to do better.  Part of what caused problems last year was that I read a lot of Kindle free books, and some of them were pretty light and even embarrassing to admit I read.    Paranormal mystery, anyone???   And I also embarked on the Great Books Ten Year Reading Plan.   This sounds classier but it is hard to document because it is broken up into pieces to make it easier to digest the harder philosophical works.   I also found this Seven Year Plan which includes the Gateway to the Great Books series, so I have been plugging through that slowly as well.    It sounds confusing but it isn't really, because basically when I get slowed way down reading, say,  Aristotle's Physics, I can turn to Twain short stories and Chekhov plays in the Gateway series.

This year I want to slow way down on the light fiction.   And I also want to focus more on reading books we have around the house, after two years of mostly e-reading.      The main challenges will be (1) having to wear my glasses whenever I read, rather than resizing the text to primary size and (2) not having an easy way to highlight and annotate.  I hate marking up books, no matter what Mortimer Adler says!   I hate seeing my writing on the pages.  I get the creeps even touching the page with a pencil or pen.   The best way I've found to deal with it is to buy a whole lof of those little post-it arrows that you can get, and put them on everything I want to remember in a book.  But that means I have to keep both glasses AND post-its around me whenever I'm reading.  So old-style books definitely do have their drawbacks.

I decided especially to focus on children's books.   Many of the books we have on the children's bookshelves are favorites from my childhood.  But some I just bought because someone recommended them, and didn't actually read them.   So I'm going to pick out some of the ones I haven't read, and start trying to read at least one a week.     What I would really like to do is post a review of or supplement for each one I read, but we will see : ). 

My Great Books reading will continue.  I would particularly like to focus on GBs I either want to read for myself, or that my children will be reading at some point.   For example, right now I am reading Tocqueville's Democracy in America which meets both criteria.  I've wanted to read it for a long time, AND Clare was reading it this year for college, and I might have Kieron read at least some of it next year when he studies US History. 

Finally, I want to be more regular about my spiritual reading.  Again, I will focus mostly on the books we already have around the house, but I also found a couple of Catholic reading plans:  This one by the late Fr John Hardon and this one by Fr McCloskey. 

If I blogged all this I would write about nothing but books! (and maybe that would be a good thing!).   But I do hope to spotlight the children's books, at least, because I like searching for a given book and finding that others have discussed it.    And I will try to keep you up to date on whatever Great Book I am presently struggling through, so if you are interested in reading some of those, you will be able to follow along if you want.

In another post I will try to list some of my reading for 2012, though as I said, I have a sadly incomplete record.