52 Weeks, 52 Books

Something I intend to do more of during the next year, is read more books. That feels like it’s an obvious thing for an aspiring writer to do, but I have a bad habit of getting distracted by television, internet and news sites.
It’s easy to think of news articles and TV programmes produced the previous month as being more relevant to my life than a 19th century book about 17th century French soldiers.
But I find books more absorbing and, as a result, a superior form of escapism. Unfortunately, they also demand more, compared to vegging out in front of the telly or laptop, which are essentially passive forms of entertainment.

I also intend to write a brief review after I finish each.
They’ll be reviews rather than analyses – a more or less superficial look at the book, the impressions it made on me, how much I enjoyed it, and so on, rather than a more technical look.
I started this blog intending to do a few in depth analyses of television programmes and films I love and hate (and one day soon I intend to do some more). I was specifically planning to leave books and short stories out of this kind of in depth analysis. The reason for this is that films and television, even with the more subtle elements, you can see or hear what’s there, on screen or the soundtrack – it should be relatively easy to spot the most relevant elements. Of course, with prose, it’s harder to tell whether a phrase early in the scene planted a certain visual idea in my head, or I came up with that myself.
There’s also the fact that it’d generally take me longer to read a six hundred page novel than the two hours I’d spend watching a film – and it might be slightly harder to refind a specific part to make a point about the storytelling.

Anyway, I intend to read at least 52 books this year, old and new, long and short, fiction and non-fiction, and will post reviews here on the blog.