As previously mentioned, the hashtag #ReadMyOwnDamnBooks captured my attention in a big way. It inspired me to take a good look at how many books I own that I have not yet read, and the results were sobering. Which is to say: I own too many books that I have not yet read, and it’s time I gave those books my attention.
I’m ambivalent about annual reading challenges, as I’ve seen they can sometimes have unintended consequences, of the undesirable sort. For the foreseeable future, I won’t be doing any challenges that involve reading a particular number of books per year. But a challenge that invites me to rediscover the books I bought that have somehow managed to disappear into my tottering stacks (before being read, I might add) sounds excellent. The temptation to purchase wonderful, intriguing new books will be fierce, I expect. But I will do my best to keep tackling those existent stacks.
To kick things off, I began by compiling a list of five recently purchased titles and plan to update with more as the year goes on. I’m quite excited to see what I’ll discover. I’m equally excited to be able to announce that I dove right in on New Year’s Day by reading Brian Selznick’s beautiful, moving The Marvels
, 
, and 
. One name repeatedly invoked by characters is Robert Burns, Scotland’s national poet and the creative mind behind a refrain familiar to New Year’s eve revelers the world over: “for auld lang syne.”
” at Christmas time. I had made it habit but not yet a tradition.
came out, I’ve been telling myself that I should reread this epic poem. The last time I read it, I was in high school studying modern Greek with a tutor. This tutor came to my house each week. Seated at a round table in my parents’s shades-of-brown family room, with its faux wood-paneled walls, I’d read out loud from a modern Greek translation of The Iliad. I think maybe we discussed it? I can’t recall exactly how I felt about the poem, other than that it seemed to involve a lot of killing, trash talking, and whining gods.