I mentioned that I am working on six reading lists now.
They include the post-election one, which I have been working on since January 2017. Technically I guess it was post-inauguration. It does keep expanding, but once I realized that it was going to become so unwieldy I started letting other lists in around it. I finished a couple of books on it in October, and I will get back to it soon. It might currently include 31 finished main books, plus another 19 supplemental books and papers, plus another 20 books or research topics.
(My being this way is well-established.)
The newest list is related to death and grief. It started with two books from a subset of books I have always meant to get to, and three more were added while I was reading the first one. I think if you are following along, it is pretty clear why that would be a topic where I would feel a need for some preparation. Honestly, the first one was very helpful, or I think it will turn out to be so, but maybe not in the way that you would expect. I will write more about that in time.
The most encouraging of those lists was my gardening list. You may recall that I had one last year:
https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-gardening-reading-list.html
As I was wrapping up my small gardening attempts for this year (just some pumpkins and tomatoes) I thought I should get some reading done to see if there was any fall prep I should do. Of course even after I read those twelve books last year, I had more to read.
The first pleasant surprise was that really there seemed to be only four gardening books left that I needed to read. I did add one in that I had thought of as more of a biology book than a gardening book, and I did gain two additional titles to read from this reading, but really, it was only two more. So much of the frustration of reading is that it keeps requiring more reading, but that may not be a permanent problem. There may be a point where I reach enough knowledge on a topic, at least for a while.Go me!
That went along well with another thing that was going on: a growing desire to get ahead of some of my other reading.
I get new books to read so often that it feels like I will never catch up. Possibly I think of that more as I approach a new awareness month and try to select out of many options.
I don't know if I have ever written about this before, but I will periodically scroll through all of my To-Read books on Goodreads (currently 1466). It's really more compelling than soothing, but it feels like a relief when I finish. I suspect doing this periodically is one reason that titles can easily come to mind when it is a good time for me to read them.
In addition, I love organizing via spreadsheet. Tangible organization may be kind of a pipe dream for me, but I find lists comforting.
I'd had a list of books for my education make-up reading - along with a few other things I needed to get to - back before the hard drive crash. That spreadsheet may be the data that I miss the most. There was more in there than books, but there were books there. When I say there was a subset of books I've always meant to get to, that subset existed in that sheet, and then I recreated it on a sheet of paper, along with some other stuff.
Anyway, I did not try to recreate the education make-up list (yet), but I did go through and create columns of books that would work for the different awareness months, as well as capturing lists that had kind of existed mentally for sports, autism, music theory, music history, and drawing. (The drawing one had been written out before.)
I have also spent some time going through those columns and seeing which items were available through the Washington County library system, which were available through Inter-Library Loan, and color-coded them accordingly. If certain adjectives are coming to mind to describe these practices and the person who does them, I will not say you are wrong. I am okay with my being this way, but I get that it can seem weird and sad.
I did this after May, so I didn't start pulling from the first four columns until September, with my first National Hispanic Heritage Month. That is not quite done yet even as I have started working on Native American Heritage Month. I am not going to finish either of those columns this year, I can tell you that. The way they blend together is interesting, and I will write more about that tomorrow.
I really do think that I can read all of the Asian Pacific Heritage Month ones this year. Black History Month is a bit harder. Having been at it longer, my list is much larger. In fact there were several that I did not add to the column because perhaps they could also fit under another topic, but they are still there on Goodreads. (And, realistically, there are other mental lists that have still not been captured, but I am sure they will be at some future date.) However, I still believe I can do a lot, and I can do it in a more organized matter, and I can make progress.
This is truly an area where it's about the journey, no matter how much I care about the milestones. I am sometimes impatient to have knowledge, but there are a lot of good books, and a lot of interesting things out there, and that can keep me entertained for a long time.
As long as we are on the subject, I shall make a confession: When setting my reading challenge for the year, I entered 220, but in my head, it was really 240. Then I hit 220 early (now at 247), so now I kind of really want it to be 260, though I am not setting higher and higher goals like last year, which ended up being 321 out of 300, even after I raised it a few times. It is only a mental 260! (FYI, lots of comic books last year. Still a fair amount of comics and children's books this year.)
And as always, hey, friend me on Goodreads!
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