A new year has arrived and I have again been tempted to make New Year's Resolutions. There's always a chance, a slim chance, that I'll follow through on these good intentions, for a while anyhow, but more likely is the letdown in mid-February when I admit that I didn't do what I was going to do and I had best give up.
The alternative is my Every Day Is the Beginning of a New Year theory which means I can create a new set of resolutions and begin following them on the 13th of February of the 3rd of September or whenever.
In fact, I did make such a resolution on the 23rd of November 2022. I had gotten my hands on a new book called Great Short Books: A Year of Reading -- Briefly, by Kenneth C Davis. His theory, and I think it's a good one, is that we sometimes do not tackle an author because most of their work is found in 300+ page works and they look too daunting. Whereas anybody can read a book that is less than 200 pages and get a feel for the style of an author.
Thinking it best to ease into this project I began on 23 November with E B White's Charlotte's Web, then went on to re-read Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Toni Morrison's Sula. One book a week for 52 weeks, every one of them (excepting two I think the author warns us) fewer than 200 pages long and worth reading, in his opinion. I then read The Ballad of the Sad Cafe by Carson McCullers and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neal Hurston. Having just re-read Jane Eyre (again) I am I now reading Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea.
And it has been as easy as that! A New Year's Resolution kept for six weeks, which is a better record than I've been able to reach for decades. The secret, I think, is to start whenever - any day of any month in the middle of the week - and to keep expectations low.
A Happy New Year to you and may you find your reading resolutions as easy to achieve as these have been for me. So far.