2022 reading project

Usually, for my annual reading project, I set myself a goal of a specific number of books for the upcoming year. This year, for example, it's 66: the number of years I'd lived when I set that goal. At this moment, I've got 13 books to go before the end of the year, and three of those on my stack are picture books—one of them in Portuguese, so it might take me a little longer than 15 minutes. But still. This is doable.

This next coming year, though, I was thinking about all the big books I haven't read—because of that goal: five books a month doesn't really allow for big books. And so I thought, what about changing things up: make next year a leisurely big-book year? One book a month.

I will not be reading À la recherche du temps perdu, at some 3,000 pages (and that is only the thirteenth-longest novel out there, the longest, written in Tamil, being 22,400 pages). I'm thinking more along the lines of Isabel Wilkerson's Caste (496 pages) and The Warmth of Other Suns (640 pages), both of which I've wanted to read, but I've felt I needed the luxury of time. There's Richard Rhodes's The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which I've owned for decades, but... it's so long! (My preferred length is less than 300 pages; this one is 896.) And Richard Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest (720 pages), about the Vietnam War, also one I've wanted to read forever. At least, I think I want to read it. I might also allow the luxury of the veto in this next challenge—given that I will be spending weeks with these books. If, one hundred pages in, it hasn't grabbed my attention—on to the next big book.

In fiction, there's John Le Carré's A Perfect Spy (624 pages) or Louise Erdrich's The Night Watchman (464 pages). Or War and Peace (1,350 pages), which I have already promised a friend I would read—so I guess that's on the list. Perhaps a Stephen King volume or two (I have already read The Stand [1,200 pages]—it opened my eyes to the very possibility of big books being... possible). I'm sure I'll find others.

Plus, I seem to have stumbled on the Greek classics (a report on The Iliad will be coming in a few weeks), so there's always The Odyssey—in two translations, because that's how the venerable Professor McCall, my online Stanford instructor, recommends we read these—since we can't read (or hear) the original Greek. I'm thinking Lattimore and Lombardo. That should take me a month, easy.

So many good long books out there. I will, hopefully, also be able to intersperse short reads—or at least picture books—in amongst the longer ones. But I'm happy to have a goal for 2022: twelve long reads. Huzzah!

P.S. I'd forgotten, but I wrote about just such a goal a while ago. I think now is the time.