Like Spike Jones', my new year's resolutions are usually tongue in cheek and in my case impossible to achieve: cure cancer, produce world peace, read Pilgrim's Progress, reverse global warming.
But this year I have made a single literary resolution and I intend to make a good faith effort to carry it out: I resolve to create a reading list and then read it. After I have met the deadlines on the RL each month I will be free to read anything I like.
I think it was when I finished the third book about the US Supreme Court in as many weeks, after having read five or six books about Hillary Clinton in five or six weeks (they start to blur after a while), that I realized I needed to get some control over my reading.
Besides avoiding the excesses mentioned above, a few other things will be driving my reading this year. I like to read the 10 books the NY Times chooses as the best of the previous year. I read many of the books on various mock Newbery lists in an attempt to predict the winner. I belong to three book groups and have been attending a lecture series for which there is assigned reading. I long to read with some book bloggers' reading challenges. I'm about to begin reading a book a week from 100 Great American Novels You've (Probably) Never Read, most of which I indeed have never read. I'm about to watch the DVDs and do the reading for a Teaching Company course on the English novel. And I am trying to re-read some "classics," not to mention reading for the first time some that I've never gotten to.
One day last week I awoke to find I was beginning chapter three of a biography of Katie Couric. That did it. This sort of thing must be avoided. Standards must be imposed. Deadlines must be met. New year's resolutions must be made.