Beyond My Control: Oh dear, another project

To prove I am both learning and not learning the lessons of last year, I have sort of fallen into a new project for 2011.

Projects didn't turn out so well in 2010, with abandoned blogs and still unfinished crochet rugs. So that lesson is not learned.

Also in 2010 I did very little reading, comparitively, but that's a lesson I am planning on learning.

There were two main problems with reading last year:

1. I was exhausted most of the year and therefore frequently went straight to sleep at night without picking up a book, something which it used to be physically impossible for me to do. (I used to keep a borrowed book on the bedside table in the spare room at my friends' place so that when I crashed there I had something to read me to sleep even when I'd had far too much wine.)

2. It wasn't that I didn't want to read, it's that I frequently struggled to find the book I was in the mood for. There were a lot of half finished books in 2010.

Late last year - on the back of picking up a few Penguin classics in Auckland airport on my way to the States - I started to fall into a pattern of reading classics. Old books that have survived the test of time. And it's been satisfying, and for some reason doesn't seem to suffer so much at the whims of my reading moods.

So I've decided to go with it.

The arbitrary date is 1960 (because the last book I read over the weekend was written in 1958). I'm going to attempt to go through the year reading only books written before 1960, and trying to avoid re-reads unless it's something from years and years ago that I really didn't appreciate at the time. But really, there's not much need for re-reads given how many classics there are out there. So many that I haven't read. And I have a Lit degree in my past, so it's not as if I'm starting off a low base.

At the moment: Mansfield Park.

I know, I know, Austen: easy. Except I have a mental block with Mansfield Park. I've read all of Austen's other novels more than once - my copies of P&P and Emma are particularly battered - but I've never been able to get through Mansfield Park. Or even have it register at all, judging by my copy of the book. I must have owned it for at least 10 years, probably longer, and was convinced on picking it up this time that I had only even made it through a couple of chapters. The dog-ear on the page HALFWAY THROUGH would seem to indicate not, even though I still have no recollection of the book at all. On this current attempt at reading it I'm now several chapters in - and quite liking it - but none of it is ringing a bell at all. None. I think that dog-ear must have been accidental. (Aside: I dog-ear the pages on my own books, but never ever on borrowed books.)

We shall see how it goes. Next up perhaps some Dickens, or Moby Dick, or The Three Muskateers.