Hello,
I decided to start this blog as an exercise in self-discipline. Some people, you see, collect dolls. Some collect china, porcelains, and other rarities. A few enterprising souls collect dead bodies in cold storage. I am less ambitious than those last sorts, as I have restrained myself for the past few years only to accumulating novels, non-fictions, and poetry collections on my bookshelf. The problem has become that while I have many reading options, I am only finishing, say, 50% of the novels I buy.
I want to change this. The challenge I'm giving myself is to buy no more books until I've finished all of the ones I've got, no matter how tedious or poorly-written. This blog is going to be the keystone of this promise. By forcing myself to update at least once weekly, I'll hopefully not only keep up with my reading, but who knows? Maybe I'll even entertain a few people as I work my way through my collection.
So what will I be talking about? Well, I'm a pretty voracious reader, even in spite of my recently low completion rate, and even in the poorest books, there are occasionally great turns of phrase, interesting points, fascinating character development. I plan to blog about my thoughts, reflections, and general impressions of the books I'm in the middle of during each update. My magazine subscriptions should also provide lots of interesting stories and ideas that I can weave in to whatever is striking my fancy that particular day.
With that preamble out of the way, starting this coming week, I'm going to pick up with my first book, "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" by David Mitchell. I also have this week's Economist and month's Atlantic to plow through. So folks, let me entertain you, and at the least, entertain myself.
One grad student's attempt to read all of his unfinished books in one year, and enlist the help of the internet in guilt-tripping him into doing it.
Why would you force yourself to finish books that are poorly written or 'tedious' (assuming you have given them a fair chance, having read the first 50 or so pages)?
ReplyDeleteGood question. Truthfully, I'm being somewhat glib. Most of the books on this list are deeply beloved by large groups of people. So for me personally, I decided to approach the abandoned books on my bookshelf from a position of tabula rasa.
ReplyDeleteAs for the books themselves, some, I started and then got distracted by another book, or some event occurred in my life that created a gap between I could return to the book. Others, I just wasn't really getting into at that point in my life. The blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates (ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com) made a point a few months back that when he comes across a book that many other people love, but he can't get into, he just tells himself, "Wait, I'm not old enough to appreciate this yet". So part of this, too, is that for those books I found tedious, I'm giving them a second chance to see if I've aged into them.