Reading goals: a conundrum

 

About time for me to finally start writing about reading, right? Right? (Or more like, starting to write any kind of blogpost in the first place!)

It's a bit weird, but I really enjoy having a fixed goal for something - even my hobbies - but I also hate to put pressure on myself when something is supposed to be done for fun. I'm absolutely not good at dealing with pressure, but a little bit of it helps to get things done, I guess. So it was quite difficult to do both things at a same time and I often enough failed to meet my set goals - probably one of the reasons why my to-read pile seems to be steadily growing in size. That's why I sort of alternated between having a reading list and just picking up random books from my piles over the last few years. The only kind of goal I set myself was a certain number of books to finish at the end of the year, which was about the only thing I managed to do (along with reading at least one English books every month, but by now I read more English than German books anyway...). But I do wonder: sometimes I feel like this kind of method only ever led me to reading really easy and/or thin books. The thicker and more difficult ones are usually lying around for years, even though I am very curious about those ones, too. There's this complete edition of Shakespeare's works I bought like five years ago, or the complete works of Oscar Wilde...or many other books who shared their fate for quite a while now.

So instead of all the easy (though admittedly very entertaining) stuff I wanted to start reading more classics and more important books in general, but how does one get around to doing that? Where do I start? There's just too much I want to - and should - read, so I felt sort of overwhelmed. Well, and now there are those list with a hundred or so books everyone should have read. I never quite liked those, but maybe they would be a good starting point? Still, I could never decide on one, because there was always something missing. (And yes, I am aware that I could also read books that weren't included on such a list, but well, you know...)

However, I found this list a while ago and while it's significantly longer than the other usual ones, it also has quite a few interesting books on it - books I already had on my plan-to-read list anyway. Also it seems to have a nice balance between well-known classics and newer books. So I thought I might as well look into all the other books too. It seems like the list is mostly English-language centred, but that is fine with me as I'm mostly curious about those anyway. (I have to admit that I've already read a lot more english, japanese and chinese classics than german ones. I never really read much of that at school because honestly, my school sucked and hence I'm quite the uneducated idiot, haha.)

So that's some kind of long-term goal which could serve as a nice motivation to finally work on getting through the more serious stuff. Oddly enough, the thought of a list with thousand items on it doesn't sound overwhelming at all - I sometimes just don't know how my brain works. Well, of course I probably won't read every last of the 1000 books, but I'm at least determined to have a look at all the stuff on the list. Especially the comedy, crime and sci-fi/fantasy sections could be really interesting. And I'm really looking forward to discovering lots of great books, authors and possible new favourite stories!