A new year's resolution

I thought I'd share today about one of my new year's resolutions that makes great use of thrift resources.  What is it?

It's about books, and what I'll be reading this year.  I love to read!

Like most everyone else, I've learned over the years that the more specific I make my goal setting, the better likelihood I have that I'll achieve my goal.  

I've come to love the week around New Year's Day; as a child, I always felt a strong sense of sadness as soon as Christmas Day was over.  The end of Christmas meant a return to school, and a whole 'nother year to wait till the next Christmas - nothing but a let down.

But now, as an adult, the Christmas season is so busy that the day after Christmas signals a time to slow down and enjoy the post-holiday peace, and I love New Year's as an opportunity to think through what I hope to achieve and change in the coming year.

A few years ago, I started setting goals for the number of books I wanted to read.  I love to read everything, really, but over the years I've spent enough time reading magazines that they started to eclipse the time I've spent with books.  So I wanted to up my book reading goal.

So I set a number last year - I think it was twenty-five books to read - and I fell a bit short.

So this year I decided to do something new and different.  This year, I decided to not only pick my number to read for the year (20), but also to also pick the books out in advance.  I have bookcases FULL of books I've picked up at Goodwill, thrift stores, etc. that are all waiting to be read yet (hence, the goal).  So how much fun was it to travel my bookcases choosing my books for the year?  So fun!

I picked the number twenty since I narrowly missed finishing twenty-five last year, and that was listening to a decent number of them as audiobooks (lots of painting last year).  I wanted to read twenty actual books this year, and that gives me a goal of just less than two per month, which seems achievable.  (It also leaves a little flexibility to throw in another few if I come up on something I just really want to read right away.)

So without further ado, here are this year's books:

So, I tried really hard to pick a diverse group with lots of different categories.  There's an extra book in there (the "Gone With the Wind" book on the bottom - it's more of a coffee table-type book so I'll read it but I'm not counting it as part of my twenty).  I also have one other that my son is currently reading; I like to read something and pass it on to him so we can discuss it.  (He's dyslexic, so I look for things I think he'll like to keep him reading.  We kind of have our own little book club; another reason I wanted to leave a little space for extra books.)

With a few exceptions, these are all books I've picked up at Goodwill, etc.

I've got:

-One book in Spanish (Aproveche su Dia)

-Two spiritually-themed books (How to Think about God and 90 Minutes in Heaven)

-One animal book (Alex and Me)

-One political book (An Inconvenient Book)

-One history book (7 Events that Made America America)

-Two classics (The Last of the Mohicans and The House of the Seven Gables)

-One psychology book (Dissociative Identity Disorder)

-Three books to learn from (Invent it, Sell it, Bank it, The Martha Rules and How to Rent Vacation Properties by Owner

AND

-some that are just purely for fun! (The Glitter and the Gold, Camino Island, The Madame's Business, etc.)

So it's weird, but this pile's got me so motivated and excited!  Something about collecting them all in advance makes my goal seem more concrete, and makes me want to read extra.

How much of a book nerd am I?  Well, this is how I start every day.  EVERY DAY.  I get up, make the coffee, and read a couple of chapters.  If I have to be somewhere early, I just get up earlier to fit it in.  If the weather is amiable for being outside, I read outside (with a cat on my lap).  If it's cold, then I'm inside (with a dog on my lap) and some nice background music.  I hate to get up and frantically rush around; I like a nice quiet slide into my day.

And just to confirm how weird and compulsive I really am: I also have a Saturday book and a Sunday book.  These are different than the weekly read.  The Saturday book is always a "coffee table book" - the kind that you don't really read like a "real book" but they have a lot of great pictures, or else they're so full big and wordy you don't really want to read them every single day (but you do want to read them, if you know what I mean...like art books or travel books).  The "Gone with the Wind" book on the pile is my first "Saturday book" for this year.  It's a history of the book and movie, very photo-heavy.  It usually takes me a couple of months to read a "Saturday book," only on Saturdays (of course).

On Sundays I only read the Bible, or a Bible-study type read.  "Aproveche su Dia" is my current book ("Seize your Day"); I read one chapter each week.

So there it is.  And somehow I'll still find a way to filter some magazines (and of course, my vintage "Ideals") in.

How am I doing so far with the new plan?  Well, after two months I've read two books and I'm nearly done with two more.  So on track.

I find most of my reading material at Goodwill, and once I've read it, it goes on the shelves at The House of Goodwill to share with future guests.

After all, does it get any better than to sit by a lake and read?

I mean, really?