Reading Plan

My current reading plan is based on three things: piles, recurring titles, and rereads.  Like many active readers, I always have several books lined up (mentally or physically) to read next when I finish my current books.  I also maintain a book list, a document of books I want to read at some point. This list doesn’t include everything I want to read, but it does include titles I’m worried about forgetting.  So it doesn’t, for example, include all the Dickens novels I haven’t read yet but plan to (Dombey & Son, Martin Chuzzlewit).  It also for the most part doesn’t include books we own, since those are physically present, taunting me to read them or shaming me for not having done so.  The list only shames me when I consult it. Currently this list is (in Google docs) 22 pages long, with about 1,000 titles--enough to keep me busy for a while.

So, in addition to that list I have three piles of books-to-read on my dresser.  These include books we own and books I’ve checked out of libraries.  I try not to check out books unless or until I actively plan to read them, but sometimes I get carried away.  At any rate, the first phase of my reading plan is to get through at least some of the books in those piles, which includes these library books: The Collected Works of Joe Brainard, Steven Moore’s The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800, Shakespeare’s Edward III, Iphigenia at Aulis, by Euripides, and a book of short stories by Mary Caponegro, The Complexities of Intimacy.  The pile also includes some books we own, including William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own, and Glen Cook’s Chronicles of the Black Company.

After I get through this selection, or during the getting through, I will next/also turn to a list of what I think of as “recurring titles:” books that keep showing up in lists of great novels, that keep getting mentioned in random articles on the web, etc., books I know I want to have already read but have just never gotten around to:

Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart
Atwood, Margaret. Handmaid’s Tale
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment
Lessing, Doris. Golden Notebook
Morrison, Toni. Beloved

After that, and/or concurrent with that, I have a list of books I want to reread. Rereading is always a particular joy of mine.  I have certain favorite novels I reread every few years, including Ulysses, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Lolita.  But this rereading list is one for rereads of books that will be my first return to them after a number of years:

Barth, John. Tidewater Tales
Ellroy, James. Older books before LA Quartet, and then Cold 6000 trilogy
Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom
Gaddis, William. Recognitions, JR
Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake
King, Stephen. Dark Tower
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick
Milton, John. Paradise Lost
Nabokov: Gift, Enchanter, Sebastian Knight, etc.
Pynchon, Thomas. Against the Day
Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest

I also have an ongoing rereading project of Shakespeare.  About ten years ago I discovered the wonderful Arden editions (for some reason they’d never been assigned when I was taking Shakespeare classes in school), so I’m playing catch-up and trying to read through both the Second and Third Series.  Hopefully I’ll get through them all before they start a Fourth!  I am also interested in some of the apocrypha, and I want to read more Beaumont & Fletcher, Webster, Marlowe, etc.

THEN, after all that, or at the point when I can’t wait any longer (because if I’m honest with myself, I admit that I’ll do this long before I get to rereading the Wake), I plan to re-read the marvelous Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson. This ten-volume series (along with the companion books by Ian C. Esslemont) was one of the major reading highlights of the last five years for me, and I can’t wait to delve into them again.  Both Erikson and Esslemont are still writing Malazan novels, and I will certainly read them as they come out, but it’s the Big Ten Erikson novels I really want to focus on.   When I do that, I will also pay attention to the Tor Books Malazan reread project, which has been going on for a few years.

So that’s my reading plan for the next couple of years.  As always, it’s subject to change and whim.  We’ll see how it goes!