Personal Goals for the New Year

This week, I cut through the enormous pile of books I plan to read: I put the books of lesser priority on a shelf of back burners, and I now have a list of books I want to read this year (not in any order):

1) When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
2) The Laws by Plato
3) The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut - the last of his novels I aim to read
4) The Koran
5) The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet Nest by Stieg Larsson
6) A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
7) Room by Emma Donague
8) Being & Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre
9) V by Thomas Pynchon
10) The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Thomas Wolfe
11) A Prayer For Owen Meany by John Irving
12) The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
13) Beloved by Toni Morrison
14) Cold Sassy Tree by Olive Ann Burns
15) Necessary Illusions by Noam Chomsky
16) November 1916 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn -- I doubt I'll get to it, but here's hoping!
17) The Gates of Hell by Harrison E Salisbury
18) Life of Pi by Yann Martel
19) Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen
19) The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

There are two books I've started and put down, which I would like to pick back up again. They are:

1) A Dead Man's Memoir by Mikahail Bulgakov
2) Coraline by Neil Gaiman

These books are incredibly short and it's an embarrassment that I haven't finished them yet. And I LOVE Bulgakov!

Last year, I read an extreme amount of philosophy, from Kierkegaard to Heidegger, de Tocqueville, and Sun Tzu. I also read Dave Cullen's account of Columbine (which was EXCELLENT) and Krakauer's exposition on Mormonism. I've even read a little theology! But this year, I want to return to something equally important to me, and cut back on the non-fiction and philosophy. I want to return to the novel.

But there's something else I want to do as an extension of my intent of returning to the novel. I want to try to read at least three really good mystery/suspense novels this year. I'm about halfway through Tana French's Faithful Place, and while it is fairly good, none of her characters move beyond the lower-class Irish stereotype set forth in Angela's Ashes. It feels sort of like I'm reading Angela's Ashes all over again, except someone got murdered.

There is one other goal I can now complete: I can watch the rest of Six Feet Under. It is kind of a relic of my depressive phase, but I still love it as a work of art. No TV series has so captivated me as SFU has.

What about getting a job and moving out? I hear you ask. Those don't need to be stated; they are a given. I'm quite sure getting a job accounts for the New Years resolution of roughly 10% of the country, and I'm one of them.

2010 ended with a crash. I had a car accident on the day after Christmas. Thankfully, the car was a $2,000 sedan, about 8 years old. It was my workhorse: only problem is that I needed it for delivery driving. I'm otherwise fine--I can even drive without having a panic attack!--but I'm still a bit shaken up by it. Despite my initial travels in that direction, the fact of a near-death experience has not made me a religious man. I cannot put enough of the pieces together to build a compelling case of divine conspiracy: There is no apparent motive, and the set pieces are natural enough on their own: I am solely responsible for what I went through, and I am comfortable understanding the random movement of my car on black ice as parallel to a roll of the dice. Occam's Razor must prevail.

But doesn't mean that the experience hasn't an affect on me. I still can't yet figure out if I have PTSD, as I still think about the event, and driving makes me a little unduly nervous, even if I'm only going into town. I'm doing deliveries tomorrow. In the Honda. That should be fun...