New Year Resolution Reads

[Veho]

With the New Year fast approaching, I'm sure many of us will be making New Year Resolutions. So, with this is mind, what books are you resolved on reading in 2010, that you have kept putting off for one reason or another?

Personally, I must read a Dickens novel this year and a Dostoevsky. I've also had Lorna Doone on my bookcase for years and I'm determined to read that too.

[Dinkleberry2010]

I'm determined to read The Friend Of The Family and The Eternal Husband by Dostoevsky, Romola and Daniel Deronda by George Eliot, Mansfield Park by Jane Austen, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte, and The Beautiful And Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

[Zeniyama]

I'd like to re-read David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (I stopped before I even got out of his adolescent years last time I tried, and I keep feeling bad about it), and possibly actually read As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner instead of just sitting and looking at it gather dust on the bookshelf.

[LitNetIsGreat]

I've got to read books around my dissertation topic, which is Wilde! So I really need to restrict my reading to that as much as possible, which doesn't sound too bad, but, you know, you like to read where your fancy takes you so it will still be a little bit of a task at times. Personally, at the moment I would rather be looking at other things, and I have a window of 2/3 weeks to do so, but after that (and an exam) I must focus my attentions on the aforementioned stuff or my personal tutor will be very upset. :bawling:

Other than that my resolution is to dig myself further into the realms of Buddhist philosophy, including more primary texts, which is not much of a resolution because I am lapping that up at the moment, so barring that I don't know, maybe Racine because he is sitting on the top of my bookcase looking a little 'issed off with me!

Maybe I should cement my understanding of the old Greek masters too, Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides. However, if I do these things I feel like I am neglecting my main task which should surely be my dissertation. Alas, the woes of a working student!

Good question - ah, to have more time in this world!

[Desolation]

My New Year's resolution mostly revolves around not being so lazy and being a better writer, but I also would like to read the following books next year without any loss to my social and school lives:

The Rosy Crucifixion by Henry Miller
In Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett
The Unnameable by Samuel Beckett
The Castle by Franz Kafka
The Will to Power by Friedrich Nietzsche
The Freud Reader
The Basic Writings of Heidegger
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
Stories by Anton Chekhov
Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
The Adolescent by Dostoevsky
The Double by Dostoevsky
The Gambler by Dostoevsky
The last part of Demons by Dostoevsky
North by Louis-Ferdinand Celine
Rigadoon by Louis-Ferdinand Celine
The Basic Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ulysses by James Joyce

[sixsmith]

Robert Musil's 'The Man without Qualities' is at the top of my 2010 list. I've also been avoiding Gaddis' 'The Recognitions'. And I've resolved to read more Patrick White.

[Travis_R]

I have quite a few books I wish to read, but the ones that glare out at me in particular are Shakespeare's Complete Works as well as Proust's In Remembrance of Things Past/In Search of Lost Time.

[Barbarous]

I'm going to concentrate on more reads, writing & annotating these rereads.

As for first reads go, here a brief list:

JR by William Gaddis
The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling by Henry Fielding
Jacques the Fatalist by Diderot
Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf
Vanity Fair by Thackeray
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
I'm sure a volume or two of Proust is also on the horizon.

[Brad Coelho]

Plenty on tap for 2010, perhaps my resolution would be to finish that which I've started (Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, Brothers Karamazov)...but I can't help but look ahead. I don't know if it speaks more to a self-diagnosed ADHD or an insatiable appetite, but I'm likely to start turning pages of Absalom, Absalom!, Notes from the Underground, White Nights, Sirens of Titan...

[dfloyd]

and most posters have aspirations too high. this is the problem with resolutions. If you set your goals too high, then you are unlikely to meet them. Reading all six volumes of Proust is a year's challenge in itself. Why not read the best volume which is reputed to be Swann's Way? Tom Jones is one of the two best 18th century novels. The other is Tristram Shandy. Why not take at least three months to read Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews, then start on Tristram Shandy. These are very commendable objectives, but setting objectives too high can mean you don't reach any or but a few. Reading all of Shakespeare's plays took me three years. It is highly unlikely anyone will get through 37 plays plus the sonnets in a single year.

As for me, I've already started. I'm about halfway through
Chekov's collected short stories. Just begiinning Tolstoy's third long novel: Resurrection. Also started Borges' Ficciones. For a little of the Classical Greeks, I'm trying Aristotle's Politics and Poetics. And for some easy reading, I have set out Austen's Emma. That's enough for now. Happy reading everyone!

[Dr Jekyll]

Since I have a LOT of challenges and work ahead of me, I'm sticking for now to reading "The Canterbury Tales" and "Paradise Lost" thoroughly. Oh yes, and finishing "Moby Dick", it has been just standing on my desk, waiting to be picked up. :brickwall

[mal4mac]

I agree with the comments on setting your sights too high. I set a target for reading the RSC Complete Shakespeare this year, but I have failed :) I'm about half way through. I found a scene a day, with rests on weekends, to be an acceptable pace for me. Some scenes are very short and I 'did a few' on some days! I initially tried aiming for an act a day. This sometimes worked, at other times I fancied 'a change' before completing an act. The problems with resolutions is you often don't know what you are getting into. If you haven't much experience in reading Shakespeare, you might give up because you find it too hard to (say) spend two hours reading him every evening. I think of him, and have experienced him, as being like smoked salmon -- a small amount, often, is wonderful. But forcing down 200g every evening quickly pales...

I found a good 'one year aim' was to read all of Montaigne's essays -- many can be easily read at one sitting. If you aim to read three pages every day, you will easily get there. I found Montaigne complemented Shakespeare very well -- I warmed up with Montaigne for half an hour before engaing with the complexity of Shakespeare. Then wound down with Tom Jones or Dickens...

You shouldn't need to make a grim resolution to study literature. It should be like resolving to eat your favourite yoghurt. Literature should be a great pleasure and something you look forward to. If you find Shakespeare or Dante difficult, just slow down and read all the notes! Then it becomes fun...

[Barbarous]

I don't think reader's goals are set too high. More than likely, I'll be reading Sterne while reading a writer like Mann or Borges, perhaps even reading three or four books at once. With that said it's not at all ridiculous to want to read a selection of books, obviously it is subjct to change. But it is perfectly possible and plausible to read most of the books mentioned, I can see one finishing A la researche du temps perdu in a year's time if deicated.

[sandwiches]

So far, my goals are to read the huge classics. Or at least attempt all and read most.

Moby-Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary (in French)
In Search of Lost Time, part 1 (in French as well)
War and Peace
Gravity's Rainbow (this will be my 2nd attempt)
and finally, a little non-fiction reading with Godel, Escher, Bach by Hofstader.

Should be a fun year!

[Red-Headed]

My resolution will be to spend more time reading than drinking Deuchars IPA!

[Pecksie]

I plan to read at least one novel by Dickens and one by George Eliot.
I also want to read Tolstoy's 'War and Peace', Burney's 'Camilla' and 'Evelina' and Rousseau's 'Nouvelle Héloïse'.
And more seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women's literature, too.
In the Spanish-language front I want to read Norah Lange's 'Cuadernos de infancia' ('Childhood notebooks'), the work of Uruguayan writer Armonía Somers, and more by poetess Marosa di Giorgio.
There's a lot more, of course... these New Year's reading resolutions are such fun.

[kasie]

While I was still working I started a 'Retirement Box' for collecting together all the books I'd always meant to read but never got round to starting. First two books into the box were Don Quixote and Moby Dick. Retirement got delayed, one box became two, became a shelf, became a whole book-case: now it's coming up to five years since I finished work and guess which two books have still not been touched? :nod: That's right - so maybe this year I really ought to get round to them.

[Vladimir777]

-The Odyssey by Homer
-Lots of Shakespeare plays
-Madame Bovary by Flaubert
-Dubliners and Portrait of an Artist by Joyce
-Aeneid by Virgil
-Possibly Divine Comedy (not sure if I will have time...)
-Blood Meridian by McCarthy
-As I Lay Dying (as someone else said)
-1984 by Orwell
-Dark Tower series by Stephen King
-Start the Bible (I doubt I'll be able to finish in 2010 when I'm reading the above-mentioned stuff
-Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky

Knowing my speed of reading and how I get distracted, I kinda doubt I will get all these done, but it's worth shooting for.

[meinabox]

I've got a few books I want to read in 2010...
Daniel Deronda and Romola by George Eliot
Shirley by Charlotte Bronte
The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather
Robert Elsmere by Mrs Humphry Ward
Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell