2014 Reading Goals

I tweeted out some reading goals for 2014 a few nights ago, but thought I'd memorialize them here as well.

• Read 12 books for my monthly book group
• I just joined this group a few months ago, and the books are definitely out of my typical reading lists.  The first few months are:
• January - Persuasion
• February - Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe
• March - The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
• April - King Rat
• May - The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
• Most of these look interesting, and I've actually read at least part of King Rat before, but I doubt I'd have selected any on my own.
• Read 6 academic nonfiction books
• So serious stuff with footnotes and things.  This will almost certainly include the latest Peter Brown, who's one of the most readable academics I've encountered.  The King's Two Bodies would be an ambitious attempt.  The recently published Professor Borges: A Course on English Literature is another candidate.
• Read 6 Books in translation
• This seems like a good way to get out of my comfort zone.  Candidates include The Arabian Nights , Borges, and various suggestions from Arabic Literature in Translation (who actually put up a page on where to start if this is a New Year's resolution!)
• Read 12 books of fiction.  1/2 by women and 1/2 sci-fi/fantasy.
• The 1/2 women is a minimum goal.  The sci-fi fantasy is a max goal - I'd like to read at least 6 works of fiction that aren't sci-fi/fantasy.  

That's a very achievable list that stretches me in places.  I've already had one friend on Twitter suggest other possibilities for the "In Translation" category.  

I stuck a goal of 50 books into Goodreads this year, mostly to make myself actually track how much reading I'm doing, since I don't generally do that.  We'll see how that goes.

I'll have non-reading goals in the future, but Child #1 (codename Tadpole) starts a new school in January and turns 3 in March.  By then we expect to have welcomed Child #2 (codename Sprout) into our family.  I've been a Stay-At-Home Dad & a Work-At-Home Dad, and it's unclear how much I'll be doing each of those by the end of the year, so other goals seems silly at this point.  

Sometime in the future I'll probably put some effort into thinking about how I use Social Media (and how I want to use it - Hi Goodreads account I haven't touched in two years!), keeping up the house, engaging my brain, parenting my child, etc., but all of that for the future. For this month, reading intentionally is quite enough.