Preface

A Year of Books I Should Have Read By Now

I love books and have an overly ambitious reading list. I am also a very distractible person, one who jumps from project to project, from book to book, without getting nearly enough done. That may be all you need to know about me. Oh, yes, and I’m kind of hooked on this blogging thing.

You see, I wanted to start a year-long project in which I only read books I had already read at least once before. The problem was the groaning bookcases and boxes full of books that I hadn’t got around to reading for the first time yet. (I don’t know how this happened, except as a particular manifestation of my distractibility.) Some of these books I’ve neglected for ten years or more. Some are newer books from authors I’ve just discovered. Some are important pieces of literature that I feel pretty guilty about not having read. Still others are just for fun. It seemed impossible to put them all aside for a whole year, even to reread my favorite books.

But this stops now. I’m giving myself one year to read as many of these lonely, dusty books as I can. To keep me on track, and to make things a little more interesting, I’m going to record my opinions and other thoughts on these books on the pages of The Distractible Reader.

Now, I’m not a professional reader. By this I mean that I have no particular formal education in literature or book review. My post-secondary training has been in chemical engineering, a smattering of other sciences, and education. I’m reading these books purely as an armchair (or perhaps sofa or propped-up-on-pillows-in-bed) reader. It’s likely that I won’t have a clue about some brilliant symbolism in a novel. A good work of history is likely to all be news to me. I may gush more over a particularly creative work of science fiction than I will over the most important works of the most respected literary masters. In short, I might not appear to really know what I’m talking about. (I welcome comments, but please consider these guidelines.)

But nearly everybody learns to read even if almost nobody is an expert. In this Year of Books I Should Have Read By Now (and hopefully in other years with other themes) I intend to celebrate amateur reading by cramming in as many pages as my brain (and my eyes) can stand. Few genres are safe from such a distractible reader as myself, although my shelves are overloaded with science fact and science fiction, fantasy, classic novels, history, biography and memoirs. This could be a bumpy ride with many a swerve, curve and test of nerve, but those rides are always the most fun.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some reading to do.

Coming soon: The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux (my Halloween read) and Gods, Graves and Scholars by C. W. Ceram