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Looking forward to 2013


I don't own a crystal ball and have no idea what 2013 will bring, reading- or otherwise. However, one can always speculate.

In 2013 I will look into repeating the What's in a Name challenge and may enter other mini-challenges as I see fit. I will continue the TBR challenge, with the aim to read 50 TBR books from my own library. If I reach that number before the end of June, I may push it up to 75, but I will be happy with anything above 50. There are just so many other tempting books available from the libraries here that I can't commit to more. 

I will also try to buy as few books as possible. I am saving up for some serious travelling and plan to try to cut down as much as possible on buying non-essential items. I do consider books to be just about as essential as water and air, but when you own as many TBR books as I do and also possess a library card giving you access to hundreds of thousands of books, buying books on speculations (as I have been doing for a long time now) is not a priority. Therefore I hereby pledge, in 2013, to only buy books I 
a) absolutely must read and can not get by any other (legal) means,
b) want for my keeper shelves. 


 As for books to be read in 2013, I would quite like to read more in my native language than I have been doing for the last 10 years or so. Every year during the weeks leading up to Christmas the market gets flooded with new books (book publishing in Iceland being a mostly Christmas affair - I really should write something about this phenomenon...) and I promise myself that I will read the books everyone is raving about, and then never get round to it. I have even fallen behind with my favourite Icelandic crime writers, which I really need to remedy.

 Since most of the books I got from my grandparents (see previous post) are in Icelandic, those will be a priority, but I also plan to read some Icelandic books that I have put on my other TBR list, the one of books I don't own but want to read. But these are just wishes, and I don't intend to make this a challenge or a pledge.

 As for actual titles, I do know I would like to finish Brennu-Njáls Saga (The Saga of Burnt Njáll), which I started in 2012.Then I want to read Sturlunga saga because I want to have the original story straight before I begin to read a modern trilogy of novels based on it, the final book having been published this Christmas season. 

  Other books I'd like to read/reread in 2013 include
  • A Blink of the Screen by Terry Pratchett (which I got for Christmas - I'll probably wait until I can include it in the TBR challenge, meaning I will read it in June or thereabouts)
  • Volume 1. of the Jón Árnason collection of Icelandic folk-tales  
  • Some of the many, many books I have "on hold", i.e. books that I have read anything from 1 chapter in to 2/3 of the book and then for some reason stopped reading it. This especially means Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov and The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, but also such varied books as The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart (which I am reading in English for the first time), A Thousand Miles up the Nile by Amelia B. Edwards, and The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley.

 In addition, I would like to (finally) get going with Ulysses by James Joyce. I bought a copy in 2009 shortly after acquiring a book of annotations for it, but the annotations are longer than the actual novel and I get jittery just looking at them. I'll probably end by just diving into the novel and only using the annotations if things get really incomprehensible. If I do make the plunge, you can expect to see blog posts about my efforts.

 As for more book blogging, my interest in that is at a low ebb at the moment, but who knows: it might pick up again.Right now I'm planning to repeat the reading challenges overview from last January. Those posts should start rolling during the coming weekend.
Finally, I hope 2013 will be at least as good a reading year for me as 2012 was.

How about you? What reading plans do you have for 2013? Feel free to comment or post a link to your own reading plans/resolutions for 2013.


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Comments

Alex in Leeds said…
I was reading about the Christmas Book Flood phenomenon in December and it sounded amazing, I'd love to read your experiences of it. :)

I'm focusing on a couple of authors I want to get to know better, reading more early 20th century books and I'm taking part in a couple of fiction in translation reading months (January in Japan and German Lit Month). It's never really about reading X number of books for me, more about widening and deepening more knowledge.

Here's to excellent books for both of us in 2013!
January 03, 2013 4:33 pm
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