2011 will be the year of excessive reading. I’ve found it so, so hard to read properly since graduating. From reading like four books a week, I have now been going at the same novel for five months. Five months! To my defense, I have been working a lot, and I have been reading other stuff (erm, like the Internet). Nonetheless, it is just plain wrong. I can’t even look at my bookshelves; all the unread books stress me out.

Clearly, it can’t go on like this any longer. So, I thought I’d tag along on one of these many reading challenges that are going on at the moment. And as all good things come in threes, I thought I better do three of them.

I find the American South endlessly fascinating as a dramatic setting and I love Tennessee Williams and should really give Mockingbird a rest and explore new territory. So, I’ll have a glass of sweet iced tea and read Faulkner, Chopin and Margaret Mitchell (because, even though I might possibly, once or twice, have implied to have done so, I have never actually read Gone with the Wind) for the Southern Literature Challenge.

As I have a soft spot for the Irish I am also set on reading Oliver Goldsmith, John Banville and Elizabeth Bowen (and hopefully find inspiration for a fourth along the way) for the Ireland Reading Challenge.

Last, but not least, will be my own baby: The Decedent Reading Challenge. I’m thinking Theophile Gautier, Octave Mirbeau, probably some poetry and perhaps, as icing on the cake, a masked ball at The Last Tuesday Society (because one must give one’s body pleasure so that one’s soul is happy there).
Fingers crossed, this will work!