Sunday 11 July 2010

And finally...


After all the pre-publicity, this is it, my summer reading project.

I need a bit of discipline, and I need to stop having my book-buying rate being quicker than my book-reading rate, because I don't have the space to keep increasing my collection indefinitely, and I don't need more books than I can read - it's just greedy.
So, in the afternoon after my exam, I went round all the shelves (and there are many) and collected all the books that I hadn't read into one place - the two complete shelves you can see above. The rule was that reference books and pure textbooks didn't count, nor did things like cookery or knitting books, but in general anthologies or collections were in, and things I'd got quite a long way through but not finished were in, and I wasn't allowed to exclude things because I'd only borrowed them, or because I didn't like the look of them, because in that case I should either be getting rid of them or giving them back.
I then did some preliminary sorting - from top right to bottom left boustrophedonically it's non-fiction (all the pelicans together) - old fiction - modern fiction.
Now, anything I choose to read must be from those shelves (or the library) (or rereads from elsewhere in the house) and I'm not permitted to buy any more books until Booker-time in October. This isn't meant to be imposing a great hardship, more acknowledging that if I bought the books in the first place it's because I thought I'd like them, and that some of them nonetheless look a bit difficult, and that sometimes you enjoy difficult books even when you'd feared them a little bit at the start.
I'm doing well (albeit cheating slightly by starting with some little ones) - post number 3 of today will tell you more...

1 comment:

  1. Thank you for introducing me to my new favourite word: boustrophedonically.

    Excellent.

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