Grow to perfection--read.

When I was a child, one of my favorite modes of terrorism was taking a nice, clean book and balling up each of its pages--one by one, in my fist--then smoothing the sheet back out again. I was very careful not to tear or rip anything. The end result was a curiously thickened book, cover (hard or soft) mostly pristine but each page absolutely wrinkled. I'm not sure why this act appealed to me so much, but I think it had something to do with wanting to absolutely dominate the thing...without having to necessarily read every word of it. Because mostly these were books beyond my reading level: decorative Bibles, dad's self-improvement manuals, etc. The act itself: grabbing, squeezing, releasing the page, seems like the closest I could get to extracting material, since I couldn't do so in the more traditional manner...reading and comprehending. So whether I opened it and understood two words was irrelevant; when I was done with the book, it felt thoroughly used.

I can read a little better than back then, but I still have a tendency to want to squeeze books for all their worth. I can't just pick up, browse, set down. I have to research, catalogue, highlight, ramble about plots/characters to disinterested friends, etc. So I decided not only do I need an excuse to start writing again, I need an outlet--other than my disinterested friends-- for getting the most out of books that I can.

This year (2011) I'm going to read 12 books from Modern Library's list of top 100 novels of all time (reader's choice). One per month, so that I still have time to read a few non-fiction books, (since I inherited my dad's weakness for cheesy self-help books), more Stephen King, and of course daily Facebook news feeds.

My goal is to keep this blog in order to keep myself accountable for reading and finishing at least twelve classics--which is a big deal for me, considering I can probably count the "classics" I've "finished" on one hand. But also to keep myself in the practice of reading critically, as terribly syllabus-sounding as that is. Since graduating this past August after 18 or whatever years, I feel like I lost an essential part of myself, not finishing reading assignments or writing essays anymore. I chose to major in English because I have always felt literature to be the best case study of human nature. Every novel I read adjusts my worldview a little. I read this quote once: "Grow to perfection--read." Beautiful in its brevity and accuracy, right? I'll totally jump on that train. In fact, I've been using that sweet little maxim as a convenient excuse to indulge myself in way too much leisure reading for years now.

So, maybe this will help me feel more connected to something I used to enjoy--reading, thinking, writing.

But probably this will be my first and last post, and I'll forget about this blog like the other fifteen I've started and gotten bored with.