Start thinking about ambitious reading plans for 2018 now?

[Extollager]

With a little over a month to go before 2018 begins, I thought it might be timely to offer a thread for the discussion of ambitious reading plans for 2018. At the moment I'm considering, but not yet committed to, the idea of reading a couple of very thick Penguin Classics that I've owned for years, or at least giving them a serious try -- St. Augustine's City of God and Cervantes' Don Quixote. They're both books I've started but not finished.

As always, a pertinent question is, If not now (in 2018), when?

I have some other hefty books in mind for reading before long, too, but these are more daunting.

Also, I'd like to bring the project of having read all the Shakespeare plays to completion, sometime in 2018. Right now I have King John begun, but my bookmark seems to have taken root at the beginning of Act 2.

 

[Vince W]

I do this every year. I say I'm going to read this and that and the other, but I always get distracted, failing miserably. That said, Shakespeare is on my list every year. I also plan to read more Dickens, Chesterton, and most importantly finish Discworld.

I'm still only halfway through Dances With Dragons and have the last three books of Wheel of Time to finish. These, though, are likely to remain unfinished for some time.

 

[Randy M.]

I have a shelf with several books set aside for Fall and Winter, and haven't started a darned one except a short mystery I just finished. Anyway, I expect I'll dig into some of these:
The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
Slade House by David Mitchell
The Ghost of the Mary Celeste by Valerie Martin
A Fatal Grace (a.k.a. Dead Cold) by Louise Penny
A Man of Parts by David Lodge
Death at La Fenise by Donna Leon
My Best Friend's Exorcism by Grady Hendrix
Dark Entries by Robert Aickman (I did start this, but sometimes a story or two by Aickman is enough to chew on)
Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay
The Secret History by Donna Tartt


Randy M.

 

[Caliban]

I’ve been meaning to do a Fiction by women only year for ages. Still not done it.

 

[Paul_C]

Whilst I shall continue to mostly alternate between classic and more recent sci-fi, and book and kindle sources, I think that this year I shall endeavour to complete Ulysses - James Joyce, a book I've started a number of times but never got very far with.

This time I'm going to cheat slightly - having found that YouTube is stuffed full of audiobooks, I shall get someone to read it to me - while I browse the internet and make entertainingly odd noises with guitar and pedals.

The other thing I do need to do is work my way through at least one series of books that total a minimum of, lets say, four books ?

I've acquired a number of series in the last year of splurging, but have read mostly stand alone stories or tales that only stretch to two or three books - Ann Leckie's Ancillary books, for example.

 

[Vince W]

Like you @Paul_C I've attempted and not completed Ulysses. I did come across an article about how to read Ulysses. If I can find the link I'll post it, but what it boiled down to was that is said to read the parts you like. Skip the parts you don't then go back and read the parts you skipped. I've not tried it myself, but it might prove to be a useful method to read this book.

 

[soulsinging]

I tackled the unabridged Count of Monte Cristo this year and am considering the unabridged Les Miserables and East of Eden next year. I also just started Pillars of the Earth. Who needs fantasy for it to be epic?

Some pretty big, dense books on my agenda!

 

[Vince W]

I tackled the unabridged Count of Monte Cristo this year and am considering the unabridged Les Miserables and East of Eden next year. I also just started Pillars of the Earth. Who needs fantasy for it to be epic?

Some pretty big, dense books on my agenda!

But were any of them in the original Klingon?

 

[Extollager]

Years ago I read the published diary extracts of C. S. Lewis's brother, W. H.Lewis. I found them enjoyable and interesting and not just because of my interest in CSL. WHL had been a low- or mid-level career military officer in the East. Returning to England, he bought a canal boat. He made himself an independent scholar, writing several books on 17th-century France. After CSL's death, he edited a good selection of his brother's letters. His posthumously-published diary excerpts book is Brothers and Friends. Now my understanding is that a fine scholarly writer, Don W. King, is working on a biography of WHL. I'm sure I'll want to read it. In the meantime, it seems like a good idea to read some of WHL's historical books, so I think I'll give that a try in 2018, maybe starting with Levantine Adventurer.

Reading any of these books isn't "ambitious," but to read two or three of them in a year might count as "ambitious."

 

[soulsinging]

I added Brothers Karamazov and David Copperfield today. I should be set until retirement!

 

[Extollager]

Oooh! Two favorites -- especially the Karamazov.

 

[The Big Peat]

@Phyrebrat lent me House of Leaves and, well, I think that might qualify for this thread...

Other than that... hmm, maybe 2 new authors a month?

 

[kythe]

My upcoming reading plans revolve around my 17 yr old daughter. She will be going away to college at the end of this school year. All her books will be going with her, like The Maze Runner series and The Hunger Games series. So if I want to read these books while I still have easy access to them, it will have to be in the next 6 months.

 

[Extollager]

With a little over a month to go before 2018 begins, I thought it might be timely to offer a thread for the discussion of ambitious reading plans for 2018. At the moment I'm considering, but not yet committed to, the idea of reading a couple of very thick Penguin Classics that I've owned for years, or at least giving them a serious try -- St. Augustine's City of God and Cervantes' Don Quixote. They're both books I've started but not finished.

As always, a pertinent question is, If not now (in 2018), when?

I have some other hefty books in mind for reading before long, too, but these are more daunting.

Also, I'd like to bring the project of having read all the Shakespeare plays to completion, sometime in 2018. Right now I have King John begun, but my bookmark seems to have taken root at the beginning of Act 2.

No. Not St. Augustine and Cervantes.

Boswell's Life of Johnson, the complete text. (I read a Penguin abridgment years ago.)

This will be a good deed, by the way, with reference to this thread --

From Way, Way Back in Your Book Backlog

-- since I have owned my copy of the complete Life since 15 Sept. 1984.

 

[Extollager]

And Browning's The Ring and the Book, with the Boswell Johnson and the W. H. Lewis books, and finishing the Shakespeare plays. OK. I think that's the plan. What are yours? The new year begins in just a couple of weeks.

 

[soulsinging]

Oooh! Two favorites -- especially the Karamazov.

I actually read it a few years back but don't remember it well. I came away preferring Crime and Punishment, but figure to give it another go.

 

[Danny McG]

I started reading The Serpents Mage a few years ago and then realised it was part of a series.
This inspired me, over a few months, to get all seven volumes of The Death Gate cycle as ebooks.

In early 2015 I intended to finally start reading my way through the series but I always seemed to have lots of other books on the go.
Ditto for 2016 and 2017.

I'm making a conscious effort to clear my sff books just so I can properly have a go at them

 

[vanye]

I plan to read only books that I enjoy. Now, that's ambition.

 

[J-Sun]

This year, I read over 500 stories of over 2.5 million words, mostly on the web. My "goal" in 2018 (obligation, really) is to read much more, now that I'll presumably be covering more print-based stuff. Another goal is to read a few more novels and non-fiction books than I did this year. (Given that I read almost none of those, that shouldn't be hard to achieve.)

(So I guess my main one is kind of the opposite of vanye's. )

 

[Bick]

Last year I made a mental promise to myself to read three Dickens novels a year until I had read them all. I did this last year, and I plan to do it again in 2018. I'm not sure this is ambitious, but given they can take me nearly a month to read (the longer ones anyway), it probably is for me (being a slow reader). My other reading plans are not ambitious, exactly, just vague plans I suppose. The one other vague plan that might come under the heading of ambitious is to read the Penguin black classic edition of Chekhov's stories I have (Lady with Lapdog and Other Stories) that is sitting on the shelf. Been meaning to get to that one for some time...