Eat, Sleep, Read: Bookish Resolutions for 2025

 

I can't decide if I should keep my resolutions manageable this year, or let this be a twelvemonth that I swing for the fences. 

Maybe a mixture of the two:

1. Read 64 books (Update: I read 60)

2. Continue with my new book group (Update: My new book group got absorbed into a bigger book group. It's lively and vibrant. Aaaand! I joined a second book group, a new one just getting started. It's growing beautifully, and it's making me read outside my comfort zone, which is enjoyable.)

3. Fiercely patronize my local bookstore Bazoo Books   (Update: YES)

and 

devotedly haunt my newest and most favorite library, James C. Kirkpatrick Library at the University of Central Missouri (Update: Check!)

4. Keep up my reading journal -- the one where I record all of my supposedly deep thinky-thoughts about what I've read daily, weekly, etc. (Update: haha. I do get lofty at the beginning of the year, don't I?  Not very thinky-thoughty at all!)

5. Bigger, better bookshelf. My whole damn home library all along one wall of the living room. (Update: Still thinking this one out.)

6. A sofa upholstered in emerald green velvet (Update: Same tattered gray sofa, thank you, cats.)

7. Less phone, more book (Update: Still a work in progress. In fact, it's the only resolution I made this year)

In the Middle of Everything

Still doing NaNoWriMo, but feeling less frenzied.  One thing about this experience: I sleep soundly at night.  After I empty out all my words, I fall into bed (onto futon, to be exact) at midnight or one a.m, read for ten minutes, conk out and I don't know a thing until the alarm goes off at 8:02 the next morning.  After this is over, maybe I should keep a novel on the go all the time.  Nah.

Predictably, my reading has taken a hit.  I'm now in the middle of six books, and can't seem to finish a single one.  I just drift like a tumbleweed from book to book to book then stall.  The list includes:

1. Insomnia - Stephen King.  I'm mad at myself for this.  I should be reading King.  I would absorb his aversion to adverbs by osmosis.

2. Van Gogh biography.  He was driving me absolutely nuts, so what did I do??  I picked up...

3. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. She spends pages and pages and pages castigating herself for her writer's block.  It was too much of an echo of my own life these days.  I got that Van Gogh feeling, but pressed on. She really annoyed me when she dealt with her writer's block by breezing through three or four Henry James novels in a week while working full-time teaching at Smith.  I liked her dream about meeting Marilyn Monroe, though and how so much of her journal ends up in The Bell Jar, but still. Had to give up.

4. The Slaves of Solitude - Patrick Hamilton.  I don't know.  I love post WWII fiction, I love England, I love Hamilton, I love his prose -- but I froze up and couldn't finish.

5. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing - Marie Kondo.  This is my current subway read.  I wish I could hire Kondo to fly from Tokyo to Busan and we could sort out my possessions "in one go", as she blithely puts it. I could use someone to hold my hand during this process.  Now that I just wrote that sentence, I'm annoyed with myself for writing it. Aren't I an International Woman of Mystery?  Pooh.  A true IWOM would never have picked up so much stuff in the first place.

Finally, I had a dream that all my book blogging buddies -- The Relentless Reader, Bookfool, Sam from Book Chase, Michelle from A Reader's Respite, Susan from You Can Never Have Too Many Books, Susan from Pages Turned, Sandy from You've Gotta Read This! and Unruly Reader -- got together and came to Korea to visit me.  Except they got the wrong city.  They came to Gumi instead of Busan, then they realized their mistake and headed towards Seoul!  NO!!!  I had just caught up with them as the dream ended.  Wondering what it means.