Top Ten Tuesday: Of Blogs and Books

This week’s triple T, brought to as always by the good folks at the Broke and the Bookish, is all about resolutions, but not just any old resolution.  We’re not interested in you quest to lose weight, or become financially independent the Tony Robbins way, or to finally work up the nerve to ask out JoBeth in accounting (actually we do care about all those things – we hope it works out with you and JoBeth, we really do – this just isn’t the place for that).  No, these resolutions are strictly bloggish and bookish.

And here are mine:

1. Blog more often and more regularly – I’ve been blogging more this year; this will be my seventh post, putting me on pace for twenty-one this month, roughly five a week.  But I also want to be more consistent, maybe have certain days of the week in which I blog about specific topics.
2. Comment more – I read a lot of posts.  I try to read all the posts of all the blogs I follow, or at least most of them.  The problem is I don’t comment a lot.  I’ve already made a few friends blogging by starting conversations that began with noting more than a blog comment.  Besides, I love comments, and I know others do, too.
3. Post more stand alone content – Once you take out blogfests, challenges, and Top Ten memes, there’s not a lot of stuff left, really.  I’d like to start a series on how to improve your writing: Description, character, that kind of thing.  I’m just looking for an original take, so I’m not treading over trampled ground.
4. EMS more – I made a choice when I started this blog to leave work out of it, but I think the occasional medical article, the what-to-do-if, post wouldn’t hurt and might actually convey some useful information.
5. Blogfest – It’s not unreasonable to expect I’ll hit 100 followers sometime in the next few months or so.  I want to mark the number with a blogfest.  I actually had a great idea for one, but I forgot it, of course.
6. Get my Library card – This one’s done.  I moved to Illinois a year and a half ago, but for multiple reasons I hadn’t gotten a library card for my new home town library.  That’s fixed, and now I have it.
7. Read better – I want to not just read more, I want to read more efficiently, more diversely.  I want to read as a writer as well as a book lover.  If I’m going to call myself a serious writer, reading is no longer just a casual pastime I get to when I can.  It’s now part of the job, too.
8. Help out my local libraries and promote reading – I love my local library, I really do.  In fact, I live in a cluster of small towns, so I've got quite a few around me.  The thing is, though, they’re small, and worse, they’re underfunded.  I figure now that between the blog and the newspaper, I’ve got something of a platform, though it’s really more like a bathmat than a platform at this point, and maybe I could do something to help.  Books drives, fundraisers, literacy drives.  Don’t know how I’d go about it, but it’s certainly worth looking into.
9. Read all the book on my eReader. – I acquired a ton of ebooks during the first year owning an eReader.  Didn’t read a lot of them.  I plan to rectify that.  For more details on this one, click here.  Because I know you’re dying to know.
10. Start a reading group – Believe it or not, I’ve actually found people around me lately who read.  You know, books and things.  Something besides Facebook status updates, I mean.  Posting my favorites books of 2010 list and my want to read in 2011 list made made me realize two things: one, I love discussing books with people, and two, it’s been years since I’ve been able to do that consistently.

Start the Resolution Without Me

I’m a little late to the Rejectionist’s party, but I’ve decided to participate in her New Year’s pre-resolution un-contest.  Basically, you make a resolution for New Year’s but start hacking away at it early, kind of like getting a running start.  I’ve learned my lesson many times about trying to compress important things in my life I need to be doing or changing.  Or not doing.  I don’t know if I’ve ever in my life kept a resolution, so eventually I stopped making them.  If I don’t keep my New Year’s promises, then resolving to save money, land an agent, or eat healthy will only doom those endeavors to failure.  Trust me, I know.

Instead, I’ve come up with something I need to do, but if I don’t accomplish it, the world won’t fall apart:

I’m going to read every book on my eReader. 

Doesn’t sound too hard, right?  Well it’s definitely a straight forward task, it doesn’t involve any physical labor, and I don’t need to solicit anyone’s help.

Of course, I have 50 plus unread books in there right now, including Moby Dick and War and Peace.  Also three different histories of the Protestant Reformation.  And the Histories of Herodotus.  And a science book by the guy who invented calculus (Isaac Newton).

And I decided not to include the King James Bible I have on there.

I like this resolution; it’s more of a challenge then a mandate for some great life change.  I’ve already started, too.  I’m almost done with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.


At some point, I’ll make a list.  If anyone wants to join me, that’d be awesome.  If you’re not too keen on reading Galileo’s Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences or The Physics of Superheroes (not by Galileo) I’ll understand.