Project Summary

I stood in front of my bookshelf the other day and thought to myself,

“I have a lot of books here.”

This immediately brought a question to my mind, 

“Have I actually read all of these?”

So I started looking through the books piled on the shelves, some of them neatly arranged by subjects- my beat shelf, my religious shelf, my wife’s folklore shelf- some of them piled up halfway to the ceiling, mostly the victims of recent readings, and some of them sitting crisp and unread among the thoroughly beaten copies I’ve read over and over again. Sure enough, I could say with some confidence that I had read the vast majority.

But the unread volumes bothered me, and the prospect of an unread book lurking patiently on my bookshelf bothered me. At first, I thought about going down the shelves, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man? Read it. The Moons of Gomrath? I always meant to read it, but never quite got around to it,” making a list like that. But my memory is fallible, and there are too many books I want to read again on the shelves. Not to mention, what a great project it would be to read through each and every book. And that is part of the project that I am launching with this blog. 

Over the next three years, I intend to read every book my wife and I own, all three hundred and four of them. Now, this is not to suggest that I won’t be buying more books over the next three years, but it will require me to put more thought into which books I do buy.

This might make for an interesting accomplishment on its own. Possibly something to tell my friends about, a personal oddity at best. Certainly not something worth putting out for the whole world. The project needs something more.

I’ve been writing myself for a few years now. Part of the challenge for me over the last year has been trying to determine what exactly I want out of literature in general, and my own writing in particular. I have a head filled with amorphous ideas about what makes good writing, what qualities I want to see, and how I want those topics to be addressed and developed. When I’ve tried to write them out explicitly, the result has never been quite what I want.

The problem with that, the way I see it, is that I’m trying to launch into large-scale criticism, without the background in analyzing individual books I need for that task. That problem, however, gives me the tools to solve another. When I was in college, one of my creative writing professors told us that if we wanted to review books, talk about them, and get our thoughts out there; we should write up a review of every book we read. So that’s exactly what I intend to do.

As I work my way through this project, taking books from the to-read list and devouring them like a starving animal, I will write up a review on every one. I’ll focus on the things in them I like, build a voice as a critic, and come to realize what I like in other people’ writing, so that I can put it into my own.

So that’s the project. I hope you’ll join me for the journey I’m on over the next three years and share the beauty of the written word with me.

-Mr. Cheddar