Book a Week

The year 2010 came to a close last night and, although I have never really made any resolutions, last year I set a goal to do something that seemed impossible to me at the time. The goal was to read one book every week for an entire year and for 14 weeks I was 100% successful. From January to April of 2010 I read one book every week. I was (and am) proud of myself for accomplishing that much. I am not sure I can claim to have read 14 books in the previous five years combined (excluding required reading for grad school and study material for my licensing exams) so 2010 was a good year in that respect. Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle set me back a few weeks in late April / early May and eventually wound up being the one that knocked me off my stride. I don’t blame Murakami - the book is excellent and I now have two more of his sitting on my bookshelf since finishing that one. The writing is sublime, but it’s also full of mood and the “action” involves lots of brooding and sitting at the bottom of a well. It’s also quite long, but I digress. My point is that while I did not (by a large margin) read a book a week in 2010, I did read 17 books for the pure joy and enlightenment of reading them last year and I plan to better that this year. I’ll optimistically call it my [#bookaweek][] and publish my progress on Twitter as a little bit of a challenge to myself and while I will earnestly try to read a book every week, I will be satisfied to read 26 or even 18 books in 2011 and you should too!! Here’s my list from 2010. I should also give credit to Julien for the inspiration. He’s got some good advice for anyone thinking of attempting this - maybe I should reread it today…

Happy 2011 - may it be filled with new adventures!

Book a Week - 2010