Posts Tagged ‘reading’

So today we’ll be treading on dangerous territory.  We won’t call it “the darkest wilds” or anything 1920’s pulp fiction-ish like that.  We’ll label it accurately.

We’ll call it “how Aylad thinks.”

I have trouble… lots of trouble… making New Year’s Resolutions.  It’s not that I’m perfect (well, maybe, but I’m not the type of perfect I want to be).  It’s not that there aren’t lots of things about myself that I want to improve.  It’s not even that none of the things I want to change are achievable — most of them are.  Well, a few, anyway.

The problem is that around the last week or so of December, when someone asks me what resolutions I’m making for the new year, my mind goes completely blank.

It’s probably for the same reason that I blank out when someone tells me to “be creative.”

When a thought finally does filter into the white noise that is my suddenly-empty skull, the thought is usually something like:

“I uh I well I um I can’t do this on demand!!!”  With three exclamation points and everything.

Of course, it’s rude to tell someone that, so I usually stutter out something bland, generic, and meaningless.  Like about a month ago when my wife asked me, my response was (eventually) “I resolve to make good life choices.”

I know.  Total cop-out, right?  She knew it, too, but she didn’t call me out on it.

Then, a few weeks into January, I’ll get an idea for a goal I want to accomplish.  As I’m running it through a mental checklist to see if it’s doable (something along the lines of, “does it cost money?  does it hurt?  does it involve effort?  will my peers think I’ve finally gone totally wonky?”), it suddenly occurs to me:

This could be a resolution.

This happened three days ago.  Twice, in five minutes.  So for the first time in a loooong time, I have not one but two genuine end-of-year-goals-we’ll-call-resolutions that I’m going to tackle.

The first one is that I will read (thoughtfully) all of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (although I’m taking a hiatus from my weekly Shakespeare Saturday posts, as my willpower is waning in that regard) and two, count ‘em, two of his plays.

The other one is that by year’s end, I will have read (not counting The Sonnets but probably counting the plays) ten thousand (yes, I said 10,000) pages of printed and bound text.  In other words, stuff in books, not magazines, newspapers, or electronic documents of any kind.

Yeah, 10K.  I think it’s doable.  It’s been years since I’ve even approached that kind of literary intake.  I believe in myself, though.  I can stay away from the video games and DVDs and get this done.  I’ll even post page counts here on Shreds of Truth (although I’ll probably only update the count after finishing each book… for simplicity’s sake).

I’m already in the neighborhood of 850 pages.

Care to join the challenge or to embark upon a similar challenge of your own?  Feel free to post a comment about it and to keep me informed of your progress.