Daily Archives: December 26, 2010

Sunday Salon: A Year of Deliberately Reading and 2011 Plans

Good morning! I hope wherever you’re at, you’re having a great holiday weekend. As I write this, it’s Christmas afternoon. I’m trying to read as much as possible while on vacation from school, so I’m writing many of my posts ahead of time.

So far I’ve read eight books since my break began two weeks ago. It’s not a bad total but I wanted to read more than that. The surprising part is that I’m finding more books to add to my “favorites of 2010″ list like Beloved by Toni Morrison and Rita Williams-Garcia’s One Crazy Summer, a middle-grade novel set in Oakland, California during the 1960s.  Kathy from The Brain Lair and I agree that One Crazy Summer is a definite contender for the Newbery prize. Earlier this year the book was nominated for the National Book Award in Children’s Literature. If you haven’t read either book, I hope you do so. I’m also planning a Toni Morrison read-along for next year. I should have details posted sometime in January, so stay on the lookout for it.

Last year around this time, I was contemplating my reading goals for 2010. Now I’m looking back to see how well  I did. I’m realizing that I should have been more specific when I set my goals. Instead of just saying that I wanted more diversity in my reading, I should have also specified how many books I wanted to read. I read 23 books by and about people of color and different sexual orientations but I’ve read 176 books so far this year so I could have done a lot better.

Rereading. I reread a pitiful six books this year including one of my favorites as a teenager, Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret by Judy Blume. I’m glad to say I still love it.

Project Fill-in-the-Gaps. The goal of my two-year-old list is to become a well-rounded reader. Sadly I’ve only read two books on my list this year with at least eighty left to read by 2014.

Pulitzer Prize-winning plays. I hit a home run in this category, reading five plays. Most of the plays I read are going to be featured as part of my favorites list this week. You can rarely go wrong with a play that’s won the Pulitzer prize.

Reading Deliberately in 2011

My goals for next year are pretty much the same as this year with a few changes:

Diversity. If I can read over 100 books a year, I can easily read 50 books in this category.

Project Fill-in-the-Gaps. I really like this project, so I plan on reading 25 books off my list. I would hate to wait until the last minute and devote most of 2014 to reading just the books off this list.

TBR pile. The past couple of months I’ve bought a ton of books, so next year I need to read as many of these books as possible. I’m hoping to read anywhere  between 50-100 books off my shelves.

Classics. It’s rare when I read a classic, so I’m hoping to read 20 in 2011.

I know that my goals may seem a little ambitious but many of the books I own can be placed in all four categories. So that’s some of my reading goals for 2011. What direction will your reading go in 2011?
http://classicvasilly.wordpress.com/2010/12/26/
classicvasilly.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-15
21574
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:A55GEFDUQRXEZFUIK4GFA5YHU2OTJFFD
<urn:uuid:c3239919-aeca-463b-be00-cff5d6427a74>
2014-04-24T08:10:17Z
76.74.254.120
sha1:NYI46WEMVX4KDDSKDDP2MJN6ENNPW2JY
<urn:uuid:fef8b7d7-ec75-4ec1-a800-c728645937d0>
http://classicvasilly.wordpress.com/2010/12/26/
length
response
<urn:uuid:7b97edff-b5c0-4ba3-acbc-d4730ecf8b4b>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-147-4-33.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-15
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for April 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf