The Latest Development in My Bibliophilia

        Super bored at work again today - spent half the day looking up quotes.  Not exactly sure what my fascination with quotes is all about - I seem to enjoy claiming the thoughts of others - not as my own, but as if to say "I agree" or something.  Well, anyway, looking up quotes today gave me some ideas on how to keep myself busy, at least.  I'm always looking for things to do - if it was possible to die of boredom, I would have died many times by now.  So, I found some good Herman Melville quotes, which gave me the idea to read Moby Dick again.  Lots of people hate that book, but I loved it when I read it in school.  To be fair, I did skip some chapters - all those chapters about rope and different whaling gear are not exactly crucial to the plot.  Maybe this time around I will try to get into those chapters.  That led me to another idea - on Jeopardy! the other day, a contestant said that he had tried several times to succeed in reading 100 books in a year, and couldn't do it.  He said that the secret is to read the shortest books you can find.  I started thinking about this, and as an avid reader I don't think it would be that difficult.  I am a slow reader, and even so I manage to read an average of about 50 books a year without really trying.  In my college days, (admittedly, not that long ago) as an English major, I read six or seven books a month while taking classes - that is 60 or 70 books in 10 months - so I decided to give it a try.  I don't want to read just any old books, though, I want to read good ones.  So I looked up the New York Times "100 Best Novels of All Time" and saw that I had read about half of that list and disagreed with the placement of about half of those books, so I looked up Time magazine's list of the top 100 novels.  This list has only 17 books that I've read and I agree with the placement of all, except for Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita.  That book is number 4 on the NY Times list and also appears on Time's, although those are in no particular order.  This book is about a rich, old pervert cavorting with a rebellious twelve-year-old girl - which most would agree is gross and inappropriate  - but I never would have thought it would be boring and tedious, too.  I read until there were 40 pages left and just couldn't care anymore, so I threw it away.  I am not in the habit of ever throwing books away, unless they are horrible, then I think that the garbage is the best place for them.  Life is too short to invest time in crap; along that vein, I decided that I will give each of the books on this list a fair shot and if I hate them, then I will move on to the next.

"The Bookworm," 1850 by Carl Spitzweg

     So, I'm starting with Moby Dick, which for some reason that Time and the NY Times should both be ashamed of does not appear on either list - even though I have read it already - because I had that idea first.  Then I will start with "A" on the Time magazine list and work my way to the end.  That will make 83 books, and I will decide after that what 17 others I will supplement the list with to make 100.  I bet it won't take me a whole year, but I guess we will have to see what happens.