2015 has come and gone, and it’s already the second week of January 2016! Can you believe it? Time just seems to pass by faster and faster with age, no?
You know, I was never one to make resolutions with each passing year. It just seemed so corny to me (and lame too). I mean, why plan for each year when you can plan for each day? But that was the younger self, the one with all the time in the world and freedom to explore her choices. Now that I’m older, its hard to keep track of my personal goals if I don’t write them down somewhere to remind me (age is catching up, that’s for sure). Somewhere that’s not a post-it note slapped onto my desktop, that is.
For 2016, I want to read more diversely in that I want to try different genres, some of which I might have been too scared to give it a shot in 2015. In a sense, I want to step even further away from my reading comfort zones. I want to give a book another chance (another 50 pages more) before I slam it down and say it’s not for me.
I also want to read harder, in that I might be reading more philosophy, socio-critics, and others that were meant for the academic curriculum but sadly didn’t make it into mine. To be honest, I’ve always been afraid to do this because now that I’ve graduated from college, I don’t exactly have the privilege of discussing a text I don’t understand with my classmates and professors (that’s a part of college I’ll always miss). What if I misunderstand a text and nobody corrects me? What if I don’t even understand a portion of the book and there’s nobody to enlighten me? Still, I’m going to give harder texts a try, and we’ll see how it goes from there (crossfingers that I won’t give up too quickly).
So onto the 10 books I want to read in 2016. They’re a mixture of literary fiction, older books, and maybe some popular fiction that I’ve always wanted to check out but didn’t. I see these books as a priority for me to get to in 2016, thought they are not an urgent priority. I believe I will get to them soon, and even if I don’t by the end of 2016, it will be interesting to see how many I’ve (remembered to) read.
As usual, links, short synopses, and my own commentary will be included so onwards and away!
The Man Who Was Thurday: A Nightmare by G.K. Chesterton, Jonathan Lethem
G.K. Chesterton's 1908 masterpiece, The Man Who Was Thursday, is a metaphysical thriller, and a detective story filled with poetry and politics. Gabriel Syme is a poet and a police detective. Lucian Gregory is a poet and a bomb-throwing anarchist. Syme infiltrates a secret meeting of anarchists and becomes 'Thursday', one of the seven members of the Central Anarchist Council. He soon learns, however, that he is not the only one in disguise, and the nightmare begins…
Recently I had a dream of hiding from my doppelgänger. It started out with me climbing up a huge stacks of books that were stored in a library/safe house of sorts and it was then that I saw someone looking at his/her doppelgänger. God knows why, but I realised then that mine was following me and coming up soon, which resulted in a nightmare of hide and seek.
It could be that this sparked my interest in The Man Who Was Thursday, though I’m not entirely sure if it contains any doppelgängers. Either way I hope to not get any more of such weird dreams any time soon.
The Books Confetti 