Reading Update: What I've Done, Couldn't Finish, And Plan To Do

The end of the year approaches—too quickly, I’m afraid—and time to offer my accomplishments, my failures, and my plans for the upcoming year in the what I like to call my reading life.

I have read 34 books so far, and am currently reading four more (with plans to finish them by the end of the year), for a total of 38 when the clock strikes midnight on December 31st.

This is well below my goal of fifty books a year I set for myself every year, but almost always fail to achieve it. I know now why: first, fifty books years is a wee bit on the ambitious side to begin; I was setting up myself for failure at the start. Second, in the past year, I have read books that are just too long to finish in a week.

So my goals for 2008 are as following: I will read fifty books, but this time I’ll make sure whatever book I read will be 300-pages or less. I have plenty of those. I will skew toward more fiction, which are often quicker reads then, say, non-fiction. Looks like a lot of hard-boiled, noirish detective novels in my future—Furst, Chandler, Ambler, Hammett, etc.

I was planning to read Foucault's Pendulum and Khruschev's Cold War, but they will have to wait since they are both 600-plus pages each.