The year ahead…ugh

So back when it was actually the beginning of the year, I neither had time to deal with some kind of “what am I going to do?” post nor thought I wanted to do one. After all, it’s not like I’m going to actually stay committed (four de-humiliations mentioned; none addressed!). But then I was reading all these good posts and thinking about “reading deliberately” (which I actually do do anyway, that’s not what this is about), and thinking about the blogs I read and don’t read and whether and how that should change, and, and, and…

So it leads to my usual problem, which is paralysis in the face of too much to do. And what is it that I’d like to do? Well, aside from the usual dream of “starting at the beginning” and reading…everything…chronologically, I’m interested in a few projects:

• What I have been calling the “American project”—this would include things like Washington Irving, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Mark Twain, and of course the Melville project is in some ways a subproject of this (though not entirely)

• The Melville project—I’ve already made some excellent progress with this and it is a sure thing
• Classics—talking ancient Greek and Latin here; a lot of “the usual,” which I have pretty much as a rule not read but which I’ve found I really, really like when I do
• German Romantics—I’d like to spend some more time with these guys after the class I took last fall
• South American fiction—I have read almost nothing from this part of the world. I mentioned wanting to read Bolaño, and Clarice Lispector has also been vaguely on my list for a while now. I’d sort of like to do a one-from-each-country type thing (verbivore has been having a lot of fun doing just that, I believe).
• A few other author-based projects—Nabokov, Raymond Chandler, and Philip Roth, in particular
• More short stories!
• Eastern European fiction
• A Fitzgerald/Hemingway thing involved with my reading of Scott Donaldson’s book about the two of them
• Scottish literature—more John Galt, Tobias Smollett, Muriel Spark, Hume, Smith, plus about a million other people and of course the forthcoming Scottish literature challenge
• Oh yeah, plus all the other stuff I have sitting around the house unread!

So the list is kind of…ambitious…and doesn’t even get into the issue of “filling in the blanks” that I sorely need to deal with. But if y’all have any suggestions about stuff in these categories I shouldn’t miss…