What’s In Store For 2013?

What’s In Store For 2013 January 4, 2013

--> Last year was slow.

I began the year reading my 34th book from the list, American Pastoral. I finished on Book 50, The Great Gatsby. That’s only 16 books. But here’s the catch: A Dance To The Music of Time is 12 books that counts as 1 on this list. So…I actually read 29.

Click Here!

That’s still a slightly slower pace than I had in 2011, when I got through 31 novels or so.

All that to say, now, with A Dance out of the way, I hope to pick up the pace a little in 2013. My target goal this year is to get through book 75, which would put me on pace to finish this project sometime in late 2014.

My main question this year will be: Which long novels should I tackle next?

Nothing left on the list is even remotely close to A Dance in length, but the longest novels I have left are as follows:

• Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (784 pages)
• The Recognitions by William Gaddis (976 pages)
• The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth (768 pages
• The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (1,536 pages)

My heart says I should tackle The Lord of the Rings this year, but my head says I should hold off until next year on a book that long, especially after spending so much time on A Dance this year.

If I choose to leave The Lord of the Rings alone until 2014, that would mean I definitely need to take on the second longest remaining book, The Recognitions. Then I would probably read one of the two remaining lengthy novels above so I don’t have three bulky novels to get through next year.

With the long novels also comes balancing the short novels, of which I still have a few left–including The Crying Of Lot 49, The Day of the Locust, and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

So if you thought I just haphazardly picked novels from the list to read, you’re wrong! This thing takes some strategy, especially from the standpoint of balancing my time and making sure I can keep the blog content interesting with each book.

Some of the other remaining books from the list that I could possibly tackle in 2013: On The Road,A Crying of Lot 49, Portnoy’s Complaint, The Sun Also Rises, Brideshead Revisited, and Light In August.

In other news, I hope to have some information for you about a possible 101 Books-related book this year. I’ve got a proposal written and will be working with an agent to hopefully get it in some publisher’s hands later this year. Hopefully, by the end of this year, I’ll have approval on the book for release in 2014. Not a lot to share there yet, but it is something that’s going on behind the scenes.

So there you go. Enough with all the looking back and looking ahead and top posts and highlights and lowlights and etc, etc. I’ll get back to the normal post routine on the blog on Monday.

In the meantime, feel free to share some of your input about the blog. Want to see more or less of a certain type of post? Something about 101 Books that you love or hate and want to let me know as we get started in 2013? Fire away!