davywavy | New year resolutions.

As usual at this time of year we think about the ways we can act better in the coming twelve months - be fitter, or nicer, or cleverer, or whatever. My normal resolutions are the same as Dogberts:

1) To show no tolerance to those less fortunate them myself.
2) To redefine morality to suit my own short-term objectives.
3) To conquer the earth and make humanity my slaves.

However, thinking about it none of those actually involve me changing the way I act in any way whatsoever and I think I need to do something different for 2010.
Anyway, at the start of this year as an intellectual exercise I decided to keep a note of all the books I read. In the event I probably missed a few, but the list I've got looks like this (in no particular order):

Bill Bryson
A walk in the woods
Down under
The life and times of the thunderbolt kid

Dante
The Divine Comedy

Cindy Lee Van Dover
The Octopus’ Garden

Slash & Anthony Bozza
Slash

Simon Schama
The History of Britain: At the edge of the world
The History of Britain: The British Wars

Barbara Steiner
The Phantom

Norman Davis (editor)
The Paston Letters

Terry Pratchett
Lords and Ladies

Thucydides
The history of the Peloponnesian war

Cassius Dio
The Reign of Augustus

Simon Andreae
The anatomy of desire

Harry Harrison
Make room! Make room!
The Stainless Steel Rats Revenge
Homeworld

Alastair Gray
Lanark

Iain M Banks
The player of games
Matter

Derren Brown
Tricks of the mind

Katherine Mansfield
Something childish but completely natural

Virginia Woolf
A room of ones own
Mrs. Dalloway

Peter F. Hamilton
The temporal void
The dreaming void

Malcolm Gladwell
The tipping point

Dan Abnett
Triumff, her majesty’s hero.

JRR Tolkien
The Hobbit

James Blish
Cities in flight

Nathaniel Pilbrick
In the heart of the sea

Yukio Mishima
The temple of the golden pavilion

Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson
The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Max Brooks
World War Z

Suetonius
The twelve Caesars

Enid Blyton
The mystery of the missing necklace

Stephen Saylor
The triumph of Caesar

Michael Brooks
13 things that don’t make sense

Naomi Klein
The shock doctrine

Robert A. Heinlein
The moon is a harsh mistress

PG Wodehouse
Stiff upper lip. Jeeves
Much obliged, Jeeves

Jasper fforde
The Eyre affair

Neil Gaiman
The graveyard book

Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Superfreakonomics

Daniel F Galoye
Dark Universe

Boris Akunin
The state counsellor

Frederick Pohl
Beyond the blue event horizon

Daniel Defoe
A journal of the plague year

Ayn Rand
Atlas Shrugged

BBC books
The nation’s favourite poems of love

Neil Strauss
The game

Stuart Sutherland
Irrationality

Elmore Leonard
Be Cool

Now the thing which strikes me most about that list is just how darned short it is. Yes, some of the books are long, but even so it's only about one book a week. The last time I did an exercise like this (back in 2001) I'd cranked my way through nearly a hundred in that year, and back in Ye Goode Olde Dayes (i.e. before I got a computer and devoted my life to the wholesale slaughter of pixellated ne'er-do-wells) I used to get through a couple of hundred books a year. Clearly then, there's room for improvement here.

So that's my new year resolution for 2010: Read more. At least 2 books a week on average for the year.

What's your new year resolution? And, while you're about it, you might recommend me a book or two?