Bragging is lame, I know, and reading 38 books in a year is not very impressive when you consider that George W. Bush read 100 books a year while he was in office (!) but this is a huge accomplishment for me. I had a baby and graduated with my MBA and still managed to get those books read even though sometimes it felt like quite a chore rather than a pleasure. I feel a sense of duty when it comes to my reading choices since my preference would be to read fantasy all day long and watch tv all night. I'd be an ignorant fool if I allowed such abandon all the time, so I set little goals to select books I feel will edify--classic literature, history, or political books. (Well, the political books are mostly just fun for me, but the other ones are selected out of a sense of duty.) Do you ever feel like everyone knows more than you do and you're light-years behind your peers in terms of knowledge and experience? Well I've felt that way pretty much since I was born, and the older I get (and the more experience I get), the more I know that I'm right in feeling that way. I feel obligated to try to better understand the world and maybe catch up with it, so I try to make up for my lack of everything by reading things that will help me rise out of my own ignorance. It's a slow process that won't ever be complete, but that's all right. I can strive for it forever.
Tonight I was trying to finish my last book before midnight so it could count towards my 2013 goal. I timed myself to see if I really read as slowly as I thought. In one hour I had only read 25 pages. And THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is why 11 of these books were audio books.
Next year I'm hoping to read 52 books, one for each week in the year. I have about half of them picked out and waiting by my bed. I'm so excited to get started on them. We'll see how successful I actually am once the distractions of day-to-day life start to pick up next year. Hooray for 2014!
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