2013: George Reads a Book a Week (and maybe even blogs about it)

I use Sepia filters to compensate for my poor photography...

So it turns out that I'm terrible at blogging. Seriously. The number of times I've started and stopped at this is slightly unreasonable. I'm hoping that now that I've got a project to loosely hang things around that I'll update this slightly more often - stranger things have happened. Enough self-pitying navel-gazing about an inability to stick with something - on to some sort of point.

This year, I've decided to read more. In the year and a half since I left university, I've accumulated an increasing number of books, many of them gifts, and most of them generating some sort of excitement at the prospect of getting between their covers. The trouble? Despite the best of intentions, I've been terrible at actually getting any reading done, always allowing myself to get distracted by other pursuits. Then, shortly after the new year, after reading on Gizmodo the story of this man, I thought of way to get myself reading a great deal more.

Now, I'm not crazy - I didn't want to put all my other interests on hold for a year by trying to read quite that many books, but it gave me a starting point. My rather more conservative goal is to read a book for every week of the year. Fifty two should actually be totally achievable, so I'd like to push that out a bit further if it goes well.

This wouldn't be a challenge, or very interesting, if I were just picking out short or familiar books - I want to push myself a little more than that. So I thought it would be good to get to know the reading tastes of my friends and family a little better. I've started collecting recommendations from people on the 'one book they think everyone should read'. Most people have responded to this with a tortured look and a list of three or four. If people have been able to narrow it down to just one, I've added it to the list and committed to reading it (not to say I won't pick up any of their others - I just won't commit myself to it!). This should considerably broaden what I'm reading, and lead me to (hopefully) interesting things I would never have selected myself.

Graphic novels, audiobooks, etc. all count. Books I've already read don't, unless I decide it was so long ago that I can't remember it. Note also, I'm not trying to read each one in a week - only to end up with at least 52 at the end - I'm keeping several on the go at once, but I'll try and keep roughly to schedule throughout.

So there it is. It's week three already, and I'm on schedule with three down. If you're interested, I'll be posting updates here with what I'm reading, how it's going, and my thoughts and impressions on each book. I might start posting the ongoing reading list I'm accumulating as well.

No spoilers, please

Right, that's quite enough from me for now - there's reading to do. It would be good to see some engagement in the comments, or on #GRaBaW (George Reads a Book a Week) on Twitter, which might actually give me a reason to keep updating this ;) - follow, share, shout calculated expression of discouragement at me - just show me that someone's reading! I also might move this blog to a new domain at some point, seeing as the title doesn't contain nearly enough puns, but watch this space.

For now - happy reading!

Now I'm using black and white! I'm an arrrrtist!