Reading Plans for 2021 (and Beyond)

Follow The Labels

I’m presently working through my country or region labels alphabetically. I’m on ‘France’ at the moment (actually 3 books on Paris) and will then move onto Germany, (ancient) Greece and so on. This will take me through 2021 and into ’22. After I finish that I’ll swing back to the beginning of my label list and hit each book related label in turn with the eventual expectation of having 10 books in each (book appropriate) section. I’m also trying not to let any label languish unloved for more than a year.

Dipping in the Knowledge Streams

I have a few ‘knowledge streams’ (KS) that I’ve been accumulating books in with the idea to dive into a particular subject area more deeply that I’ve previously been able to. Now that I’ve got considerably more time on my hands I feel that I can devote more of that time to areas that I’d only dabbled in. The much promised/talked about ‘Britain Alone’ strand (KS1) will definitely start this year and will look at the period where Britain essentially – although not completely accurately – stood alone against the Axis Powers, so between Sept 1939 and Dec 1941. The second knowledge stream (KS2) will be ‘World War to Cold War’ and will run historically from the D-Day landings eventually up to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992. Obviously this is a HUGE area so I doubt if my reading will be in any way comprehensive but I’ll see what I can accomplish. Lastly, there’s been something I’ve been thinking about for a while now (roughly the last 4 years) which I’ve called ‘USA:WTF’. This will be KS3 and will be a pretty scatter shot attempt to try to at least start to get my head around what’s going on in the USA right now. Any advice on possible reading from my American readers would be appreciated. I’ve been rooting through various piles of books and fished out around 40 US related books. Not all of them, by a long shot, are focused on this question/conundrum but some of them are (at least I think so!). Wish me luck. I aim to read at least 5 books in each ‘stream’ each year.  

Wild Cards

My ‘read next’ stack sitting next to me on my sofa is presently around 20 books deep. I expect to cycle through 5 of these stacks in a year. The stack represents a melding from various other stacks secreted about the house and is basically what I work from and what ends up being reviewed here – eventually. However, being me, things are a bit more complicated than that! Although I do appreciate order in my life I also value spontaneity – although it does have its time and place. In order to have both I instituted a programme of ‘probabilistic reading’ some time ago which I think is working well – essentially where I roll a dice after every finished book to determine if I drop an unscheduled book in next. In addition to that I added a pair of ‘Wild Cards’ which forced me to schedule either an influential non-fiction or a classic novel into my upcoming reading. I have increased this particular wild card to three instances. In addition I have added two more wild cards prompting books over 500pp, two prompting books by or about women and two ‘oddball’ reads. My definition of ‘oddball’ is presently somewhat fluid.    

Finishing/Progressing Series

There are a number of book series that I’ve started but failed to finish. Presently I’m mopping up the last of Cornwell’s Sharpe novels with four more to go. I’ve also got the final books in the Divergent and Hunger Games trilogies that I need to get to as well as the final Maze Runner books. On top of that I’ll be starting both the Foundation and the Dune series of books this year. I’ve read the first four Foundation and first three Dune books before but that was 40 years ago. The new series of Foundation and the Dune movie seemed good prompts to do this.

Bigger Books & Reducing the Review Pile

My review pile as of today stands (rather wobbly!) at 14. This has been persistent for a while now and means that there’s a 6, 7 and sometime 8 week gap between reading and reviewing which isn’t really optimal – at least not with my questionable memory. To reduce this I need to read bigger books. Again presently, my average book length – since records began Oct 22^nd 2020 – is 310pp. This is too low as I’m averaging 80-100 pages per day. I need to get this average above 350 and keep it there, hence the bigger books. We’ll see how that goes.

Awards

Inspired by Judy over @ ‘Keep The Wisdom’ (check it out if you haven’t already) I’ve dug out a whole stack of Award Winning books I already owned (so no excuse to buy any more just yet) during a recent hunt for another book in a series I want to start soon. Being me (again!) this won’t be 100% straight forward but it will make some sort of sense – if only eventually. I’ll be labelling any books with Awards from now on.

Continuing as Usual

If that wasn’t enough (phew!) I’ll also be continuing my normal – yeah, right – reading as we go. Presently I’m working my way through a stack of SF ‘Man Vs Machine’ books with two in the review pile (although one is already a DNF!) and after that I’ll be shifting focus to WW1 fiction. I’ll still be reading books on Pandemics, post-Apocalypse, both World Wars, the Tudors and so on plus anything that might suddenly become a ‘Must Read’ in my mind. I do miss books on Espionage and I want to read books with more analysis and synthesis rather than spotlighting a particular event – historical or otherwise. I think we all definitely need more of that!

Naturally with ‘only’ 100 book reviews planned each year there’s no way I’m going to fulfil or even start all of my plans outlined above. What I will aim at is at least to get half of them ‘done’ in some sense or other. We’ll see where we stand this time next year. Wish me Good Luck I think I’ll need it but what’s a grasp for, right?