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Thursday 29 December 2011

so many books, so little time

I have a slight problem with books. I keep collecting them. I buy more than I have time to read. Financially this isn't a problem, because I almost exclusively buy second-hand and they only cost me pence. Unfortunately, though, it is a problem for my bookshelves, which are wobbling under the weight of my collection and resentful that I haven't even had the courtesy to read many of the books they're holding up.

I have, therefore, decided that I am going to make an attempt to rectify this. I have collated a pile of all of my books that I either haven't read, or have started at some point and then abandoned, and I am going to do my best to get through them all before I go back to work in February. I have the time, and I can't walk around too much, so I figured I might as well use this time wisely to get my head in some books.


I'm pretty sure I'm not going to get through all of the above in just over a month, no matter how fast a reader I might be! I have also cheated slightly, and have not included in my list The Iliad or the Odyssey (just too much like hard work!), nor The Count of Monte Cristo. I'm also not letting myself buy any new (to me) fiction books until I finish my pile, or until I go back to work - whichever comes sooner, I figured by the time I'm back at work the list should at least have reduced significantly.

The books in my pile:

~Milan Kundera // The Unbearable Lightness of Being
~VS Naipaul // An Area of Darkness
~Gogol // Diary of a Madman and Other Stories
~Various // A Hungarian Quartet
~Gabriel Garcia Marquez // One Hundred Years of Solitude
~Charles Dickens // A Tale of Two Cities
~Charles Dickens // Great Expectations
~Kazuo Ishiguro // The Unconsoled (I did actually start to read this a few years ago but found it really difficult to get into. I'm going to try again, re-encouraged by my love for Never Let Me Go)
~Paulo Coelho // Eleven Minutes
~Dostoevsky // The Brothers Karamazov (another I started a while ago but got disheartened with)
~Tolstoy // War and Peace
~William Thackeray // Vanity Fair
~Vikram Seth // A Suitable Boy (this is massive! not sure I'll get through this one)

I can't make a start on this straightaway, as I am currently halfway through reading Women In Love by DH Lawrence, and figured abandoning one book in favour of another would kind of defeat the purpose of this exercise. I'm going to dedicate myself, though, so should be able to make a start in the next few days. Plus, I'm a sadsack and have no plans for New Year's Eve, so I will probably spend my evening reading and waiting to ring in the new year, then go back to bed.

What a life.

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