The Idea

When I graduated from university, I was so happy to be done with reading lists.  I'd never seen them as the evil some people do and they introduced me to books I loved, my third year housemate will attest to my gleeful love of the Hollyoaks-eque drama of Matthew Lewis's The Monk.  But, for every wonderful book, there would be one I forced my way through, so the idea of freedom in what I could read was a staggering prospect.  Of course, I quickly remembered that I am just the worst at being decisive and that I actually crave structure.  So, I dug out my old copy of 1001 Books to Read Before You Die (okay, I downloaded a copy of the list from the internet), formatted it into a spreadsheet and input formulae to calculate the number and percentage of books I'd read.  The result was a pitiful 86- I join you today half way through number 264.   That's 26.27373% of the way in, for anyone who cares as much as I do about the numbers.

The fact that I'm more than a quarter of the way in does mean that there are some wonderful books and authors that I've missed the chance to blog about.  Absolute classics, like To Kill a Mockingbird and The Catcher in the Rye are long gone, as are authors like Kazuo Ishiguro and Kurt Vonnegut.  And then there are other books that are gone, the ones that quickly became my favourite type- the ones I would never have thought to read were it not for the list.  In the last six months alone, these have included Margaret Drabble's The Red Queen, which led to hours on Wikipedia researching the historical truth behind Prince Sado, The Poisionwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver and, most recently Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres.  I could go on for hours...

There are rules further "only read books on the list" that I have imposed upon myself.  Following one summer of glutting on the entire works of Jane Austen to the point of frustration, I came up with these five guidelines to provide variety.  They apply to any six books read consecutively and run as follows:

1. No two books by the same author.
2. There must be books written in at least two different centuries.
3. There must be books written by authors from more than one continent.
4. There must be at least one book not originally in the English language.
5. There must be at least one female author.

The rules, of course, will change as necessity dictates.  I anticipate running out of female authors at some point, and some of the foreign language books aren't actually available in English at the moment (my dedication does draw the line at learning a new language to read a book).   But there you have it, my life's goal- at my current rate I should be able to achieve it within ten years.

So stay tuned for my first book (or 264th, depending on how you look at it).  It'll be The Ghost Road by Pat Barker, the third of her Regeneration trilogy about World War One.  I'm only half way through, but it's fairly historically accurate, so I think I might know how this one's going to to end.