The Impetus: A combination of two factors, really. The first was actually reading the list and realizing I had read 76 titles on it. Depressing. I consider myself a fairly avid reader, and granted I’ve read way more books that are not on the list, but still. 76? Really?
The second factor was an English class I took in college. The class itself wasn’t super inspiring in some ways (most people treated it the way most people treat book clubs; yeah, we’re here to talk about books, but does that really require reading them first? All the way to the end? Really?), but the professor and the books were great. I read and fell in love with Beloved and God of Small Things, two books I hadn’t planned to read before taking the class.
After graduating college and realizing that my life and mind were my own again, I wanted to use my new liberty to read voraciously books of my choosing. But I also wanted to continue to read authors and styles that I wouldn’t normally choose if I was basing my selections solely on what I thought I would like before even trying the book (it’s like eating; my life would be sadly falafel free if I didn’t try food that looked completely unappetizing at first; sometimes books are the same way).
The juxtaposition of these two factors gave rise to the quest. I’m currently reading book 157 (The Idiot), and am on schedule to finish by the time I am 35 if I keep to my 2010 (to date) pace. I likely won’t.
The Blog: When I explain the project to people, they always tell me I should write a blog about this. People keep saying that novels and print are dying, and now they say that blogs are, too, so why not bring them together? Really, I have no good reason for this and I expect I won’t keep it up. But now I can have a better response when people tell me to keep a Blog on the books I’ve read.
The Rules:
Rule Number One: If you start, you must finish.
This is the most important rule, and the foundation on which this whole project is based. Without it, everything crumbles. Just like the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the road to never making it through the Russian masters is paved with letting yourself “come back to it later” (a phrase which I unapologetically put in quotation marks, because it really means, “never revisiting Larissa Feodorovna Guishar and trying to forget if we want the Reds or the Whites to win”).
Of course, rules are made to be broken, and in my next installment (the FAQ) I’ll write about the time (just once thus far) that I have broken this rule.
Rule Number Two: No substitutions, exchanges, or refunds.
So the whole canon of Edith Wharton is not on the list. So you’d rather read The Wind Done Gone than Margaret Mitchell’s (discouragingly) lengthy tome. So what? The Custom of the Country is not, and never will be, The Bunner Sisters. Get over it. This is not a quest to read books written by authors who appear on the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die list, it’s a quest to read the list.
Rule Number Three: Books are not Movies
This one I think is pretty obvious, but clearly I actually have to read the book. The Wishbone adaptation and the Wikipedia article don’t cut it. Otherwise, I wouldn’t still be facing Don Quixote.
Those are really it. The first one is the most significant. The other two are basic to the very spirit of the project. Everything else about how I tackle the list will be covered in the FAQ. Which I may never write, because I am a fickle, fickle person, and this may be the one and only post on the quest.
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