I was hesitant last year to make any kind of planned list for 2012 but it turned out to work really well. I think part of why it worked so well is because in addition to naming certain book titles, I also just named an author I wanted to read which gave me room to decide to read what I felt like by that author instead of begrudgingly reading a certain book. So I am going to try it again in 2013 and see what happens.

So here’s the plan:

• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. I enjoyed reading Anna K so much and how Tolstoy writes at such a leisurely pace but manages to keep it all so interesting that this chunkster seemed like a good idea.
• Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust. I started reading Proust several years ago with the intention to read the entirety of In Search of Lost Time in a year, maybe a year and a half. There were others reading with me too. Some of them made it. I, however, did not. I remain stuck in the middle of Guermantes Way. It has been so long since I have picked it up that I will need to start on page one, but I mean to make it through. I won’t wager on whether or not I will manage to leap to the next book and the next. One at a time.
• The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood. The only novel of Atwood’s I have not read. Time to fix that.
• Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne. I’ve been meaning to read it for years and I am sure it is right up my alley from all I’ve heard about it so it’s time to give it go.
• Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen. I have been very much enjoying rereading a Jane Austen novel every year and this year Northange Abbey is in the cards.
• Euripides. I’ve been making my way through his plays and managed four last year. I think I have nine or ten of his plays left. Maybe I’ll manage five this year and five the next and then I can move on to the comedy of Aristophanes.
• I had Henry James and Thomas Hardy on my list for 2012 and didn’t manage anything by them, but I’d still like to. I am one of those crazy people who like James. As for Hardy, I have never read him. Maybe 2013 will finally be the year.
• More of the same authors as 2012: China Mieville, Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Charles Dickens, Clarice Lispector.
• I will be continuing my Pulitzer/ Laureate Poetry reading project. I picked up Louis Gluck’s The Wild Iris not long ago and look forward to that. I’ve been reading mostly recent poetry this year and would like to go back into the past and give Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stephens a go. But there are so many to choose from there is no telling at this point who I might get my attention.
• I’d like another try at getting my Science by women project underway. I almost managed it in 2012, starting off with Dava Sobel writing about Copernicus but then it all went for naught. It’s worth trying again, I think.
• And something entirely different, Bookman and I got ourselves a year-long subscription to the NYRB Classics. We hope to read whatever book they send us every month. The January selection is Testing the Current by William McPherson. We get a bonus book too, The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares which I have been wanting to read for some time now. Neither book has arrived yet, but I look forward to it. NYRB publishes such interesting titles that I look forward to seeing what the year brings.

There’s the plan, guide, reminder. There will also be surprises and new discoveries. An adventure! I hope you have your own reading adventures in 2013!