I know the month is almost over, but I've been thinking about my reading goals for the year. I tend to follow my gut instincts and choose books to read on the basis of whether they particularly appeal at that point in time. This can be interesting, because I like the natural, meandering nature of it, but sometimes I think it would be nice to have a little direction.
So many of you join reading challenges, but these aren't really for me because I feel they ruin the spontaneous nature of my reading choices. And because I'm not very good at sticking to plans they're a little demoralising when you look back and see how little you've accomplished. Reading should be fun, not a chore, right?
And, as you may already recall, I'm not even very good at achieving the self-imposed reading challenges I design for myself. Take last year's plan to read more books by "classic" Irish writers. I thought it would be relatively easy to read 12 books by 12 different authors, but by the end of the year I'd only managed to read four. My so-called An Irish Writers' Year is now going to be dubbed An Irish Writers' Perennial, because I'd like to try and read the other eight by the end of 2009.
You may also remember that I purchased the Penguin boxed set of Great Loves last February. There's 20 books in the collection and I've read just three of them. Over the course of the next 12 months I'd like to read one a month. They're all fairly short, novella-types, so this should be very manageable.
And, finally, if I could boost my non-fiction diet by reading one non-fiction book every month, I'd be delighted.
Let's see how I go, shall we? What are your reading goals for the year ahead?
