The General Plan

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Well, so here I am. Blogging.

I could rehash Holden Caulfield's first paragraph in Catcher, but that would be smacking of unoriginality. Suffice it to say that I am a private person, so I don't want to talk about my life here. Then again, what I will talk about constitutes a great part of my life, so there go my petty preferences...

The General Plan, as it states in my title, is a blueprint of something in my life that I am totally in control of (which is generally how I like things to be. Unfortunately, they're mostly not.). What I read. I'm talking about leisure reading stuff--not the kind that work or school requires me, though I do take leisure in a lot of them.

So, here is my general plan, placed in this blog for posterity's sake and for voyeuristic pleasure (yours, of course, whoever you are reading this blog.:))

I have informally committed myself to the following long term reading challenges, namely:

1) The Pulitzer Project - no time limit
2) The Complete Booker - no time limit
3) 1% Well-Read Challenge - modified to the "Read as much as you can or want to from the 1001 Books to Read before you Die list." No time limit, in my version.
4) London 2012 Challenge - till 2012, or course
5) FFP Diversity Challenge - this year

plus another challenge I cooked up for myself, just cause:

6) Time 100 Best Novels Project - no time limit

The first two and #6 I started a couple of years ago, the third one I started paying attention to last year. Libreria, a fellow Shelfarian, brought the 4th to my attention recently.

Actually, the lack of a time limit for most of them makes them less of a challenge than a reading plan. I'm attracted to award-winners because I don't suppose I'll be able to read all the books in the world, so I might as well choose good ones, or at least, reputed good ones. That way, I'll also know what the hullabaloo is about. Oh, and yes, they're majorly leaning towards Anglo-American works, because--I make no apologies here--that's my background and my preference. And obviously, I also have a thing for lists. (I actually have a folder where I keep print-outs of lists of award winners. Yes. Nerd.)

Of course, interspersed within the books that fall within my general plan are my guilty pleasures, for what would life be without them?:)

Oh, and I seriously don't plan to read ALL of those books, because I am not totally insane. Just the ones that interest me, however mildly.

So, this is my reading plan for this year and most likely the years to come. Majority of this blog entry, by the way, came from a post I made in one of my Shelfari groups, where I noted that I did not join these challenges formally because they required me to blog, and I did not know how.

Well, lookee here!

So, I guess I'll be making this my book blog. As if I have nothing else to do in life.

Actually, I don't. Not much at the moment, really. Hence, the obsession with reading.

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