This all began with an idea to complete a ridiculous and impossible project
That project being NaNoWriMo
It’s not necessarily the idea of writing a novel in a month that’s so impossible. If you can keep to a rather strict schedule of 2,000 or so words per day, you’ll have yourself a modest, if not sketchy, novel. My problem is that I don’t feel at all qualified to write anything approaching a novel because I hardly set aside time to read. In fact, I really don’t find myself reading at all nowadays. You can try your best to pound out a novel, but it’s truly hard to vomit up something when there’s nothing in your stomach to regurgitate. People sometimes do, but it’s mostly stomach bile and that’s extremely painful and unsatisfying.
And now that I’ve compared writing a book to being sick into a toilet, we can move on to the real reason I’m posting
In place of one impossible project that was barely started before it crashed and burned, I’m taking on another more doable feat
Read 50 books in a year
I’ve heard of the 100 book project, but in all honesty, two books a week seems a little bit silly. To polish off a novel in a matter of three or four days seems to me to defeat the purpose of reading it at all. And I am under no illusions that I could even manage that for an entire year. Perhaps I will find some books to be all-consuming and they will get finished in a couple of days, but surely not all 100. So, a book a week sounds just about right. In the event that I do manage to devour a novel in a short amount of time, I have some back-up Sherlock Holmes to tide me over until it’s time to start the next book
Given my propensity to quit deadline intensive projects like this (or knitting a sixteen foot scarf in two months), it’s entirely possible that I’ll start the first book, get distracted and say to hell with it. But as always, I am optimistic that THIS TIME I will do as planned and complete my goal
Preparing for this has been so exciting. I have a sickening amount of books that I’ve bought on a whim and have never so much as opened to the first page. I have some that I started and never finished, not to mention the millions upon millions of books I have yet to even hear of.
If you feel so inclined as to recommend to me a book or two to add to the list, have at it. I’m open to reading just about anything, save for trashy romance novels and any book that I’ve read before. I do tend to steer toward fiction, but hey, throw some historical non-fiction at me or a good biography. I’m up for anything
I will be starting with The History of Love by Nicole Krauss. From there, I have no idea where I’ll be going. I guess I’ll figure that out as I go
