Putting this on my blog will also help me keep track of it during the year. One problem with a resolution list is that the list itself tends to get lost in the shuffle. This way I won’t lose it.
Oh, a comment on item 1, which may seem like an odd resolution for an avid reader to make. I spent several hours the other day trying to make space for recent book additions in one of our bookcases. I ended up having to box some books. The whole experience reminded me of an A.N.L. Munby quote from A Book Addict’s Treasury by Julie Rugg & Lynda Murphy, which title alone sounds a cautionary (though humorous) note.
The will-power necessary to get rid of books must be maintained at all costs. Even if one buys on a modest scale — say, one book a day on average — they fill room after room with the inevitability of the rising tide. I once visited a house in Blackheath after its owner had died. It was solid books. Shelves had been abandoned years before; in every room narrow lanes ran between books stacked from floor to ceiling, ninety per cent of them utterly inaccessible. In one of the bedrooms there was a narrow space two feet wide round the bed, and there the owner had died, almost entombed in print. This macabre glimpse of the ultimate excesses of bibliomania has always been a warning.
Elly is more than slightly skeptical I will accomplish this resolution, and also pointed to the fact that I have added half a dozen books to our inventory during the last few days in preparation for my self-imposed moratorium. Oh, well. A Book Addict’s Treasury kept its rightful place on the bookshelf and was not consigned to a storage box. It is one of the more charming additions to our home library in 2007, chock full of amusing quotes on the habits of bookish folk. I recommend it highly to fellow addicts. My one regret concerning the book is the authors are too self-effacing: other than a few fascinating pages in their introduction, the book consists entirely of quotes from others. Still, a wonderful accomplishment.
- Not buy a single book in the month of January.
- Lose weight!
- Cook more – especially French dishes (Julia Childe’s The Art of French Cooking)
- Exercise at least 30 minutes every day. (Morning exercise bike.)
- Read at least two hours each day.
- Keep a reading journal on my blog.
- Do some sketching or watercolor painting at least 4 days a week.
- Finish laundry room.
- Finish day room.
- Build library.
- Finish staircase and hallways.
- Hang the two doors we bought last October.
- Make and install kitchen threshold.
- Get my workshop organized.
- Remove hedge from hell in front yard and plant garden instead.
- Plant shrubbery for birds in backyard.
- Build water feature between hackberry trees.
- Plant vegetable garden.
- Make a stained-glass project.
- Build nightstands for Sherlock Holmes bedroom.
- Build 221b Baker street diorama S.H. bedroom.
- Reserve Tuesday and Thursday evenings for reading.
- Get together with friends more often.
- Start practicing the guitar again.
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