{"id":258,"date":"2009-09-17T20:21:55","date_gmt":"2009-09-18T01:21:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/simplykaren.org\/wordpress\/2009\/09\/17\/the-reading-project\/"},"modified":"2009-09-17T20:21:55","modified_gmt":"2009-09-18T01:21:55","slug":"the-reading-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/simplykaren.org\/wordpress\/2009\/09\/17\/the-reading-project\/","title":{"rendered":"The Reading Project"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s probably because I’ve been reading Julie & Julia<\/em>, but I’m struck with the idea of turning something I’m going to do anyway into a project.\u00a0 What am I going to do anyway?\u00a0 Read.\u00a0 What would the project be?\u00a0 Simply to do what I’ve always tried to do…read 50 books in a year.\u00a0 In this case, I have the 50 books in four piles in my bedroom.\u00a0 They are the books I have collected over the past five years as I worked on my dissertation.\u00a0 Don’t get me wrong: I never stopped reading non-academic materials.\u00a0 According to LibraryThing, I read 55 book<\/a>s in 2008 and 46 books<\/a> in 2007.\u00a0 Some of them were school-related but many were personal interest.\u00a0 So, 50 books just represent a year of reading for me.<\/p>\n

In the past, as I worked on my 50 books, I didn’t have a set reading list but simply moved from one book to the next.\u00a0 Sometimes, I read books in a series (such as Sharon Kay Penman’s historical fiction set in the 13th century) but I’m definitely a grazer.\u00a0 These 50 books never came under my nose I guess.\u00a0 Some are very new…just purchased at the Book Exchange last week with points from my summer trade ins.\u00a0 Others have been laying around for a while, as long as two or three years, and come from a variety of places.\u00a0 There are four or five Wendell Berry books, both fiction and nonfiction, that came from a great book store in Lexington, Virginia, along with Drew Gilpin’s This Republic of Suffering.\u00a0 There are lots of books from another great book store in Roanoke, Virginia.\u00a0 And a few from Baldwin Books in West Chester, Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n

I’ll get the whole stack in LibraryThing and tag them “unread.”\u00a0 I’m going to use the rest of 2009 to finish up some loose ends and then begin on the pile on January 1, 2010.\u00a0 I think I’m going to start with David McCullough’s biography of John Adams.\u00a0 I’ll be on winter break from William and Mary and can curl up be the wood stove and relive the birth of America.<\/p>\n

I’m also making a pledge not to buy any more books until I’ve read all 50 of these books.\u00a0 Hmm…not sure I can do it.\u00a0 Books for book group could be an exception. Why this worry over books?\u00a0 My house is stuff with them, and I’m just trying to reduce stuff in general.\u00a0 I’m definitely a bibliophile and my book shelves provide insight into the story of my life.\u00a0 But I can’t just keep collecting.\u00a0 I need to start reading.<\/p>\n

And that’s why this needs to be a project.\u00a0 Because of the fear I have that I will somehow lose track of my love of reading.\u00a0 Several people have told me that they didn’t read anything for a year after they finished their doctorates.\u00a0 And I do find myself often putting reading aside to engage in other activities.\u00a0 I don’t want to NOT read but I find myself stymied by the books on the shelves so it may take several days for me to choose a new book.\u00a0 And despite paying for Kindle subscriptions to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and several magazines, I rarely read any of them.\u00a0 I’m hoping a project will help.\u00a0 I’m also hoping that limiting my choices to just 50 books will make it easier to choose and read books.<\/p>\n

What about the newspapers and magazines?\u00a0 I never got into the habit of reading the newspaper every day.\u00a0 I have a print subscription to US News and World Report and do glance through that, but I certainly don’t read it from beginning to end.\u00a0 Then there’s the weekly education newspaper and several research journals.\u00a0 The words are piling up around me and I’m feeling the pressure.\u00a0 How do people find time to read a newspaper every day?\u00a0 Actually, as part of my first job as a press office secretary at an art museum, I read three or four papers every day looking for articles related to art.\u00a0 I did a lot of skimming.<\/p>\n

I’m not sure where newspapers and magazines fit into my day?\u00a0 Lunch time?\u00a0 Take a work break and at least do some skimming?\u00a0 I’m discovering that the hardest part of working from home is adopting some kind of schedule.\u00a0 People with real jobs have a built in schedule but I’m a free agent.\u00a0 I have projects to finish but no one cares if I work on them at 2 PM or 2 AM.\u00a0 Just so I get them done.\u00a0 The danger, of course, is that you can work all the time so working in things like reading the newspaper is a way to take breaks.<\/p>\n

So, I’m pledging my self to reading.\u00a0 I’ll report the results here.\u00a0 Now, I’m heading to bed with a book; in this case, it’s How God Changes Your Brain<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s probably because I’ve been reading Julie & Julia, but I’m struck with the idea of turning something I’m going to do anyway into a project.\u00a0 What am I going to do anyway?\u00a0 Read.\u00a0 What would the project be?\u00a0 Simply to do what I’ve always tried to do…read 50 books \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p31UVs-4a","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/simplykaren.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/simplykaren.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/simplykaren.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simplykaren.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simplykaren.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/simplykaren.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/simplykaren.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simplykaren.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simplykaren.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}