Plans for 2017

Well this is certainly late, and frankly I’ve been wondering whether I should even bother providing reading plans for the year given I deviated dramatically last year from my beginning of the year plans.  But I will.  Two works in my annual goal were left unfinished: Adrian Goldsworthy’s Julius Caesar and Max Egremont collection of  WWI poetry in Some Desperate Glory: The First World War the Poets Knew.  I’m about two thirds deep in both books, but I’ve been reading the Julius Caesar biography for three years now. 

The planned reads I never got to start make quite a list: Herta Müller’s The Hunger Angel, Thomas Berger’s Crazy in Berlin, D. H. Lawrence’s novella, The Virgin and the Gypsy, Volume III of Victor Hugo’s, Les Misérables, titled “Marius,.” the third novel in Ford Madox Ford’s tetralogy under the heading Parade’s End, titled, A Man Could Stand Up, William Faulkner’s Old Man, Gertrude von Le Fort, The Wife of Pilate, Dante’s third part of The Divine Comedy, Paradisio, Pam Johnson-Bennett’s non-fiction Think Like a Cat, Thomas Cahill’s Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter and Lawrence Rainey’s The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose, an annotation and commentary to T. S. Eliot’s great poem.  That amounts to four novels, three novellas, two works of non-fiction, and two works of book length poetry with commentary.  Add to the unfinished works and you’ve got an annual goal all in itself.

It’s not like I didn’t read enough last year.  I read nearly the amount I normally do.  The problem is I belong to a couple of book clubs now and the books selected come out of a vote, and what’s selected is usually out of my control.  And so I had to put off planned reads.

So here’s what I’m going to do.  I’m going to march down the list above, completing last year’s list.  I’ll have to add works that get chosen from the book clubs but I’m going to limit my participation to them and try to focus on what I want to read.

In addition to those listed above, I’m going to continue reading through the Bible.  On the Old Testament side, I’m up to Wisdom books: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Wisdom, and Sirach.  On the New Testament I’ll be completing Paul’s Epistles.  In the past couple of years I’ve read Romans and the two Corinthians.  This year will be the Letter to the Galatians, Letter to the Ephesians, Letter to the Philippians, Letter to the Colossians, First and Second Letters to the Thessalonian, First and Second Letters to the Timothy, Letter to Titus, Letter to Philemon, and Letter to the Hebrews.  It sounds like a lot but many of those works are very short.

I’ll be aiming for two short stories a month as always, and I will also try to sneak in another play of Shakespeare I haven’t read yet.

Some of this I’ve already begun and even completed.  I’ll try to blog more on my readings.  I feel so guilty about dropping that.  I’d hate for my blog to disintegrate.  Well, here’s to another year of reading.