Reading Plans for 2021?

I'd like to read more westerns, more Simak, maybe take a look at the Cronin omnibus that's been sat on my shelf too long. Reread some favourites, since I rarely do that.
 
Ian Fortytwo said:
I have realised that making plans for reading goes straight out of the window
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Ditto, I get so easily diverted by seeing a blurb for a new SF book, or a crime thriller, or a spy story, or a horror, or a fantasy. Then all stops because I just gotta get me that book.

Basically it's the fat kid with a tin of Quality Street syndrome - I just jump from one to the next.

(You should see me almost crying at a curry menu when we're ordering an Indian - so many nice things but only one belly!)
 
Good question.

My SFF plans are loosey goosey - I plan on reading quite a lot, but what exactly, I'll decide book-to-book. I would like to re-read Julian May's Saga of Pliocene Exile, though - we'll see how that goes.

My classic literature reading is less flexible, I guess, as I plan to read the following specific books:
  • Another Dickens novel (I must read at least one each year in my long running aim to read all his works before I die) - this will be Chuzzlewit, Little Dorrit, or Nickleby I think.
  • Hawthorne's Mosses from an old Manse
  • More classic John Le Carre, continuing the reading I did last year, starting with The Honorary Schoolboy
  • Walter Scott's Waverley
These four will each take a while, I suspect, so I'll not constrain myself to any other specific books.
 
Dunno. My main desire at present is a holiday in a big house somewhere warm and sunny, with a pool, garden and a nice set of restaurants within walking distance e.g: rural South of France, and with no attempt at museums, art galleries, concerts etc i.e a completely inconsequential fortnight or so with the family to get over 2020.

This is a roundabout way of saying I feel the same about reading plans.
 
hitmouse said:
Dunno. My main desire at present is a holiday in a big house somewhere warm and sunny, with a pool, garden and a nice set of restaurants within walking distance e.g: rural South of France, and with no attempt at museums, art galleries, concerts etc i.e a completely inconsequential fortnight or so with the family to get over 2020.

This is a roundabout way of saying I feel the same about reading plans.
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Does that mean you cannot have reading plans, or that the reading cannot take place in a museum or art gallery, or that you want to read books set in the South of France?
 
Heh. Best not to overthink these things. The logical inconsistencies are not far below the surface.
 
Since I've been getting to the last of my unpacking after my move I've been going through the books I have and see that I have many, many books unread; some going back decades. My main thrust is to read at least some of those books I own but not read. Of course this is all subject to mood and timing and butterflies on the opposite side of the world.
 
Read William Morris’s The Sundering Flood at last. I have had a copy of the Ballantine Fantasy series edition for almost 40 years.
Follow the monthly reading plan for the Tolkien’s Late Thoughts on the Third Age thread here.
Read and review Holly Ordway’s forthcoming book on influences on Tolkien.
Read a couple of works Tolkien certainly did read or may have read and write about them for Beyond Bree, the Tolkien monthly newsletter.
Read and write about several books for my series on the books in C. S. Lewis’s life (New York C. S. Lewis Society).
Reread Roadside Picnic and When the English Fall.
Read at least one more of Bujold’s Vorkosigan novels. I’m only up to Warrior’s Apprentice.
Keep reading volumes in the Folktales of the World series (university of Chicago).
Finish Prescott’s Conquest of Peru, which I only started, months ago.
Reread one or two of Shakespeare’s late plays, such as Cymbeline.
Keep up with my 17th-Century Reading Project. This includes Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica.
Read Hawthorne’s The Snow-Image and Other Twice-Told Tales; report on it here at Chrons.
Read a Trollope novel, likely John Caldigate.
Read several more Aubrey & Maturin novels for that thread here at Chrons; next is The Fortune of War.
Read or reread at least one of the travel books I have on hand.
Reread Margaret Kennedy’s The Feast.
Read more by W. G. Sebald, including The Emigrants. Likely read for the third time his Rings of Saturn.
Have a Concordia commentary on a book of the Bible going at all times.
 
To finish up Joe Abercrombie first Law Trilogy . Book one The Blade itself was spectacular !Book 2 Before They Are Hanged which im more then halfway though has pretend equal spectacular . if you've never read Joe Abercrombie you missing out ! :cool: Book 3 is Last Argument of Kings.


 
I find it easier to review last year than plan ahead, because I'm frequently impulsive with reading interests.

I do plan to read more from women and minority authors. It has occurred to me that classic sci fi is mostly written by white men, and this still comprises a lot of my reading. But I want to branch out to authors of different backgrounds, because there really are plenty.
 
I should’ve said Vertigo by Sebald, not The Emigrants.

I'm sure I'll read some sf that I didn't list, but that's more subject to impulse, opportunity, etc.
 
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Covid affected my reading plans drastically for 2020, although i have to say that it wasn't as bad as i'd initially feared. My reading plans for 2021 are:

Finish reading Iain M. Banks SF works. (Only Matter and The Algebraist to go.)
Read Anne Leckie's Anciliary books.
Finish The Expanse series.
Read more classic Science Fiction.
Read more female authors.

I'm also looking forward to getting Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Bear Head" and Alistair Reynolds's "Inhibitor Phase", both of which i have preordered.
 
The other work, along with Pseudodoxia Epidemica by Sir Thomas Browne (as presented in an Oxford paperback of Browne’s writings, that I mean to read for my 17th-century project, is the unabridged Brief Lives by John Aubrey, bankrupt and antiquarian, admirer of Halley the astronomer, correspondent who made Hobbes write his autobiography, folklorist (as we would say now), etc. He had something to do with documenting Stonehenge, and copied an inscription on a Roman altar at Caerleon that women were battering so as to make scouring powder of its dust.
Oh, and WS’s Cymbeline would by 17th century too. Kind of an antiquarian play....
 
Besides carefully choosing and reading some books published during 2021 so I can complain how the old stuff is better (*cough*), my main goal is to read/finish some of the chunky anthologies/collections/omnibuses I've accreted over the last few years. Right now I'm not quite half-way through The Man from the Diogenes Club by Kim Newman, better than a third through Two-Handed Engine by Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore, have two more novels in a P.D. James omnibus and three in an Eric Ambler. Not sure I'll get to all of those or whether I'll peal off to something else -- I have the collected stories of C. J. Cherryh and three or four anthologies by the Vandeermeers, at least one chunky Ellen Datlow anthology ...

I also hope to get to The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Zafron, and "[a]fter that, I hope to read a short collection by Virginia Woolf, at least one novel by Dawn Powell, a couple of novels by Dorothy B. Hughes. I also hope to get to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (Twain) and Travels with Charley (Steinbeck), and reread Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Garcia Marquez)," which is what I said last year.

But as others have mentioned, nice new shiny objects will probably appear and deflect me from my current plan.
 
Almost finished the DUNE trilogy so gotta get to the end of that. I also just found out about Terry Prachetts semi-autobiographical work on writing: A Slip of The Keyboard so I'm going to read through that next then back to fishing through the works of great authors I haven't got around to finishing the bibliographies of, so some more Issac Asimov and Ray Bradbury I expect.

I gave up on YA fiction a few years ago after finally finishing the Spooks Apprentice series but I usually like the character development for series like these so I'll be looking for some more this year I think. Any recommendations welcome!
 
As usual, Robin Cook dominates my reading during cold months. Warmer months will no doubt mark my return to Perry Rhodan once again. And side stories (so to speak) are read along the way, whenever they pique my interest.
 
Ian Fortytwo said:
I have realised that making plans for reading goes straight out of the window. My plan is to try and read non fiction, mainly biographies or autobiographies. I also want to read some science fiction if possible.
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Already my has gone awry, however the good news I could be reading some Joe Abercrombie. I planning to start with three of his standalone novels.
 
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