2010 Reading Goals, Hellz Yeah

I don't do annual resolutions. I fucking quit smoking three weeks ago; I think this should cover me for the year (unless I cave in again with it, but it's going pretty darn well, if I say so myself). Instead, I'm following Annie A's lead and doing a reading resolution list of sorts. Now, this isn't set in stone; it isn't even that I expect to read everything on this list. But I want to see how far through it I can get within the year. The list is comprised in part by texts I really want to read (for example, bunches of books that I'd hoped to read over the winter holiday and will not get to are included), but mostly by books that I think will fill in some gaps in my literary education. So there are some classics on there, even ones that I don't particularly want to read (re: Melville, Hawthorne, Dostoevsky), but also tons of contemporary works that I want to read *and* should hopefully be productive for me as a scholar--if I hope to go into the field of 20th century lit (largely women's lit), there are so many works that I need to get under my belt.

Sometimes I think that maybe these lists are simply things, not unlike NY Resolutions, that we--I--do to imaginatively shove aside mortality. I binge buy books on half.com--under the impression that they're all money well-spent. I have to live long enough to read them, right? Morbid thought, but it was rising up. Not to mention I found out about someone's passing today--someone I didn't know very well at all, indeed, only through an online forum, but well enough for her passing to really make me take pause. In any case, Michelle, you will be missed.

So the lists. I read a little over 80 works in 2009. I've got a list here of about 70 total works, divided by type--nonfiction/theory (ten), poetry (ten), and fiction (fifty). This doesn't include texts I'll read for school, though I suppose it could in the future (seeing as I don't really know what I'm studying in the next two semesters), so this is a really really lofty list. But I'm doing it just out of curiosity--just to push myself, see what I can accomplish over the next twelve months. If I've got any glaring omissions, leave me a comment--I really tried to cover many bases, with classics and contemporary works, men and women (mostly women), various national origins (France, Russia, England, America, Canada, Argentina, Ireland, Colombia, Germany, and Italy are all covered), realist novels and fabulist fiction, gargantuan works and novellas and short fiction...they're all here. Without further ado (and pardon my bookishness)...