hovercraftofeel's Drowning by Books 2013

My boyfriend and I became quite competitive last year when I found out he was doing this challenge, so I decided to give it a go myself. I usually read about forty or so books per year, so I'd like to finish at least fifty this time. I have quite a large collection, not all of which have been catalogued on the site, and I haven't read about one third of them. It would be nice to reduce the number.

Here's what I chose to start:
Old School by Tobias Wolff
The Great Leader by Jim Harrison

Finished both a couple of days ago. Moving on to The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy.

March 1st Progress: 7/50 complete, recently finished Living with Sheep by Geoff Hansen, Diary by Chuck Palahniuk, and A Riot of Irish Writers by Terrance Dicks. Currently reading Amerika by Franz Kafka and Three Plays by Sean O'Casey.

Finished Candide by Voltaire and Gunman's Tally by L. Ron Hubbard. Started Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima and Divorcing Jack by Colin Bateman. I'm in the middle of a play, but haven't felt much like reading them straight through. I keep wanting to jump around multiple books.

Had to shelve Divorcing Jack because I saw the film too recently and Bateman did way too wonderful a job adapting. I've been reading Mishima for awhile because the story is so beautiful I want it to last forever and the content is so depressing I have this feeling I can stop the train wreck by closing the book. It's pathetic, but true. I just finished The Night in Question by Tobias Wolff and I'm in the middle of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn which is a terribly bleak and heavy read. I also recently started The Book of Evidence by John Banville.

This is all reading done in addition to my classes. I could tally all of those pages together, but as its mostly speeches, poetry, and prose excerpts, I feel like I'd be cheating. It just explains my seemingly slow progression. Summer should witness me tearing through some of my books.

12/50 as of April 30.

I had no time to update due to my school schedule, but I finished just over 50 books this year! I should be able to finish one more, but we'll see. Here are the last three books I read in 2013:

The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald
Indian Nations by National Geographic
1491 by Charles C. Mann

I'm about sixty pages shy of finishing Fine Just the Way it Is by Annie Proulx. I shouldn't have a problem.