Franzen Comes Alive

The Backlist Alphabet Project

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FACT: I love books. I love reading them, buying them, selling them, recommending them, writing about them, and collecting them. I love how many books surround me at all times. But sometimes my house begins to look like this:

stacks of books

THEY”RE COMING TO GET ME.

So to keep from being Collyered, I occasionally cull my library. Which I did this past weekend. And while I was having an epic nerdpurr shuffling books around, I came up with an idea for a reading goal: The Backlist Alphabet Project!

In the past years, I usually pick a reading goal that involves re-reading a favorite author’s catalog, like Kurt Vonnegut and Muriel Spark. And I always fail, and I think it’s because my brain refuses to let me re-read books when I have so many books that I haven’t read once.

I also read new books almost exclusively, because of my jobs. Which is AWESOME, but I have so much backlist hanging around the house.

This year, because I have failed so many years in a row, I didn’t even pick a reading goal. But I am now excited to embark on the Backlist Alphabet Project! (Better late than never!) It entails reading a backlist book with a title starting with each letter of the alphabet. I went through my stacks and picked a book for every letter, choosing the books that I have owned the longest without having read. (Except for ‘X’ – 3500 books and not  single ‘X’. So I picked a title that starts with ‘Ex-‘ in its place.)

Here’s what I ended up with:

backlist alphabet project

I’m excited! I think there’s a good variety here. My goal is to read all of these, A-Z, in 2016. And I will blog occasionally about my progress.

Have you read any of these? What are your reading goals for 2016? Do you know about Book Riot’s Read Harder Challenge?

Comments

  1. anmiryam says

    I love, love, love Daughter of Time. Read it in High School (when you were in diapers) and wrote one of my college essays about it. So good to see you haven’t read EVERYTHING. Many of these are lurking about waiting for me to read them as well, though some I’ve never even heard of!

  2. Jenn (SealyBug) says

    I actually really enjoyed Joyland. I hadn’t read anything by Stephen King in years and I picked it up at the grocery store on a whim.

    I have made a list of all the books I own that I haven’t read (not nearly as many as I am sure you have) and I am not allowing myself to buy anything else until I read them (or at least some of them). And then I hit a reading lull. It’s driving me crazy because I know I should be reading and I just have no motivation. I’m pretty sure it’s a bad case of March High School English Teacher Blues. (Essays. So. Many. Freshman. Essays. *shiver*)

    I know the urge will return. I just have to wait until it does. And until then, Queen of the Night still sits on my my nightstand, taunting me. (Don’t hate me!)

  3. Janani Vaidya says

    This makes me happy that Queen-Of-All-The-Readers Liberty actually has a solid backlist. My goal this year is the opposite- I am trying to read as many books as I can that are being published in 2016 (as much as I can). No specific number. I just got out of grad school (during which my reading for pleasure took a tremendous nosedive) a little less than a year ago, and I’m finally starting to feel the joy that I experienced reading books prior to undergrad, and I definitely have everyone at Book Riot, the read harder challenge, and the bookish persons I have subsequently gotten in touch with via the interwebz to thank for it. Yay reading!

  6. Jessica says

    Great idea! I sometimes get overwhelmed by my backlist which then makes me have a hard time deciding what to read next. This ever happen to you?