One of my goals for this New Year, both professionally and personally, is to get more reading done, hopefully at the expense of my lazing-around-in-front-of-the-television and/or doing-nothing-of-importance-on-the-web time. It’s not that I spend hours watching TV — I really don’t. And compared to my teenagers, I spend barely any time at all on social media. But I do think that I could squeeze in an extra hour or so of reading each day, and over the course of the year, that could really add up.
I have already started my first book of the year — I’m reading Paolo Bacigalupi’s Hugo and Nebula-award winning novel, The Windup Girl, and I’m loving it. Intense, poetic, different from anything I’ve read before. What’s not to love?
What else do I have in mind to read this year? Well, I’ve started a list . . .
First there are a few classics that I’ve never read and really need to:
Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte
Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald
And then there are some more modern titles that I’ve been meaning to read for some time:
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, by John Le Carre
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Charming Billy, Alice McDermott
And finally, there are several novels in fantasy and sf that I have been wanting to read, many of them by friends:
Cold Magic, by Kate Elliott
Of Blood and Honey, by Stina Leicht
The Forest of Hands and Teeth, by Carrie Ryan
Greywalker, by Kat Richardson
Shades of Milk and Honey, by Mary Robinette Kowal
The Demon-Trapper’s Daughter, by Jana Oliver
Sailing to Sarantium, by Guy Gavriel Kay
Earthquake Weather, by Tim Powers
What about you? What’s on your To-Be-Read pile for 2012?