A New Year's reading plan for book lovers and thoughts on the life of a book fiend

January 10, 5:33 PMBook ExaminerMichelle Kerns

Previous Next

1 comment Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the Book Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

 

There is one huge drawback to being an obsessive reader (other than fielding snarky comments about being a book geek) -- regardless of how much you read, you never feel as if you've read enough.

There seems to be an inverse relationship between reading more and feeling well-read: people who maybe read a few books a year feel good about it; people who read a few hundred a year are constantly weeping, wailing, and gnashing their teeth over the books they didn't get to.  

And if you ever do start to feel a bit smug about having conquered War and Peace or Netherland, there will always be someone there to ask what you thought about The Count of Monte Cristo or Finnegan's Wake or Seamus Heaney or the latest Elie Wiesel and you are reduced to: a) claiming, "I thought it was great," although you've not laid a finger upon it,  b) hedging with "That's next on my list to read," c) or admitting you haven't read them at all and feeling like an illiterate heathen.

Like the Bermuda Triangle,  the Loch Ness monster, or the popularity of Richard Simmons, it's a riddle for the ages.

I decided my New Year's Resolution for this year (along with losing weight, drinking less, and becoming an all-around perfect person by 2010) would be to try to correct the most glaring deficiencies in my reading repertoire by starting on a Classic and Best Books Ever Written Extravaganza.

 

And that's when I ran into the second dilemma of the book lover -- how to find a good book list.

You'd think a list of classic books (by these, I mean the typical Dickens/Dostoevsky/Tolstoy/James/Bronte English 101 tomes) wouldn't be too hard to find, but every list that I looked at had either puzzling additions (G.A. Henty -- a good author, but a classic writer?) or glaring omissions (no female authors? What about Jane Austen, for crying out loud?)

And, of course, what about modern books? There have been a positive avalanche of great works published since ye olden days; I couldn't spend all my time slogging through Thomas Mann without including Toni Morrison or Philip Roth, could I?

Nor could I ignore genre books. Smirk if you must, but life would not be worth living for me without a regular inoculation of suspense, mystery, science fiction, horror, and adventure. (Frankly, I could live quite happily without romance books. Perhaps part of my X chromosome is missing.)

After much soul-searching and rending of garments, the best and most comprehensive list I found was in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. Divided chronologically into major historical sections (pre-1700s, 1700s, 1800s, 1900s), this book just about hits every worthwhile thing put into print.

 

Everything fictional put into print that is. Could I consider myself literate if I focused only fiction? No. So I searched out a Best Of non-fiction list as well.

After a good deal of thought, here is the reading plan I finally set up for myself --  I will be rotating between the books on each of the following lists:

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

100 Modern Classics

The Modern Library's 100 Best Nonfiction Books

The best of genre lists included in Genreflecting

and, just to make sure I never have any extra time whatsoever, the A - Z author list included in the Good Fiction Guide.

All told, this list should take me roughly the next 40 years of intense reading to complete. Piece of cake. By the end of that time, I won't have anything to feel guilty about not reading...maybe.

I'll be posting my progress on this ambitious reading plan regularly here on the Book Examiner page. If you'd like to read along, or have your own equally ambitious reading resolutions, let us know! Leave a comment or direct your intentions to michellekerns@surewest.net. Subscribe to the Book Examiner to get weekly rants and raves on the joys and trials of conspicuous book consumption delievered to your eagerly waiting inbox.

First up on the Outrageously Ambitious Book Examiner 40 Year Reading Plan: Aesop's Fables and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (the first and last entries in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die).