Wait, you say. Lindsay doesn’t participate in anything, especially when it’s book-related. Book clubs? Bah! Comments? Hellz, no. Reading other people’s blogs? Only when looking for similar (often unpopular) opinions.
Well, in 2014, I want to change that, if only a little bit. I think that the reason I’ve kept this blog for so long is that I write it so selfishly: I started writing in earnest when I realized that I never remember what I’ve read for very long. You know, the time I got halfway through Franny and Zooey before realizing that I’d read it less than a year before? Yeah. It really started after Katrina, when I really got into digital preservation of memories, especially photos, since they can easily be lost. Remembering what I’d read came shortly after, but that was before the days of Goodreads, so I think I started with AllConsuming or, possibly, Shelfari. When I finally switched to Goodreads, I think I transferred all of that there. But the hurricane happened in 2005, and I didn’t start writing about every book I read until 2011. That’s a lot of years, and sometimes I forget what I have and haven’t written about.
Anyway. My blog is very insular because I generally don’t participate in the book-blogosphere since I’m only really writing for myself (except I’m explaining all of this to you, and you aren’t me, so…). In 2014, I’ll give it a whirl. In the beginning, at least. I think I found a good place to start: Roof Beam Reader‘s 2014 TBR Pile Challenge, which aims to help me get through some of the books that have been languishing on my to-be-read list for a while. Here are the basic rules: I have to choose twelve books (and two alternates, in case I can’t get through a couple of them) that have been on my tbr pile for at least a year, which means that they couldn’t have been published in 2013. I have more than enough books like that to fill such a list, so here goes:
- The Master and Margarita (Bulgakov)
- Under the Net (Murdoch)
- The Shadow of the Wind (Zafón)
- The Children of Men (P.D. James)
- The Ambassadors (Henry James)
- The Slynx (Tolstaya)
- Still Life with Woodpecker (Robbins)
- Pedro Páramo (Rulfo)
- Demons (Dostoyevsky)
- Ragtime (Doctorow)
- Wicked (Maguire)
- The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories (Clarke)
And the alternates:
- Warlock (Hall)
- Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (Riggs)
We’ll see how I do with these. They’ve all been on my list for a while, but, for whatever reason, I haven’t gotten around to reading them. I’ve been careful not to choose all long books, and I haven’t chosen books I know I’ll read like Wolves of the Calla or Dances with Dragons because I’d have read them anyway. What will be most challenging to me is planned reading: I’m the Netflix type. After I finish a book, I like to pick up whatever strikes my fancy at that very instant. Working in a library definitely helps, but you can get your hands on almost anything pretty quickly with an internet connection.
I own physical copies of the vast majority of these books, and if I don’t, they’ve been sitting on my Kindle or Nook for at least a year. I think what I’ll do, though, is put them all in one place: the sparkly new iPad Mini my awesome husband is giving me for Christmas. Tracking down digital copies of most of these shouldn’t be a challenge – and I have no qualms about not paying for a digital copy of a physical book I paid for. Paying once is enough, and at some point, I have paid for every one of the books listed above. Yay, Calibre (which organizes, converts, and transfers to various reading devices. You’re on your own for downloads).
I’ll also mention that I found the Most Awesome iOS eBook Reader Ever: Marvin. I wanted a wireless way to transfer non-Kindle books from my Macbook to my iPad, and somehow I ran across their website. It’s the most powerful reader app I’ve seen. As far as I know, the Kindle reader app only opens books you’ve bought from Amazon, and you have to plug in to transfer books you haven’t purchased from Apple into iBooks. Not cool. With Marvin, all you have to do is link it to your Dropbox account, and all of the epub books you have stored there show up on the screen, ready to download. And it even syncs your pages between devices! Better yet, it’ll sync with Calibre, which boggles my mind. End of gush.
So there’s my plan. I’ll stick with the 50, but at least twelve of those will be books from my tbr list, specifically the list above. I’m pretty sure I can do it with just a little reading discipline, especially since I’ll have most or all of them right in front of me in my handy-dandy Marvin app.
I can’t wait to start!
