Reading resolutions

I’ve made New Year reading resolutions in the past. Some I’ve kept – in 2008 I decided to reread four of my favourite historical biographies, books I read over & over again in my teenage years but hadn’t read since although I’d read a lot more about the subjects of them all. The books were Richard III by Paul Murray Kendall, Elizabeth I by J E Neale, Mary Queen of Scots by Antonia Fraser & Nicholas & Alexandra by Robert K Massie. I’d bought beautiful Folio Press editions of all these over the years & I read these at home, taking my battered old original paperbacks to work for lunchtime reading. I loved it. All of these books were like old friends, I’d read them so often & I enjoyed so much reading them again. So, that was one resolution I kept. Last year, I was going to read several books on the English countryside that had languished on my tbr shelves for too long. I didn’t pick up any of them. I’ve just read two of them, both by Ronald Blythe, & I’ll blog about them soon. I think the problem with this resolution was that much of what I read is English so these books didn’t stand out as enough of a challenge. I just forgot about them. This year, in common with a number of bloggers, I’m going to try to read some of the books on the tbr shelves before I buy any more. I do have some pre-orders from the Book Depository which will arrive over the next few months but I don’t want to buy any books for a while. I also work for a regional library service so I plan to try waiting for books to arrive at work before racing off to the Book Depository & buying something that I’ve just read about or had recommended to me by the members of a wonderful online reading group I’ve belonged to for the last five years. Cornflower is asking whether we plan to be slow readers (as recommended by Susan Hill in her book, Howards End is on the Landing) or fast readers this year. I’ve always been a pretty fast reader & I don’t think I can slow down the amount of reading I do as there are just so many books I want to read & reread. But, I’d definitely like to slow down my buying this year & savour what I already own. Hopefully writing this blog will also lead to a slowing down & an appreciation of what I read.