Resolutions, Schmesolutions.

I’m terrible at keeping resolutions. The second I make one, some secret part of me can’t wait to betray it. Sometimes I wonder if I should make opposite resolutions, like, “drink less water”, or “get a horrible night’s sleep, every night” to see if I can trick my subconscious. Oh, how I like to make things difficult!

This year, I threw up my hands and decided not to make any resolutions. But then the second week of January rolled around and I was already thinking of 2013 as a great big 2012 run-on sentence. I know that our calendar is just a construct, something to give us a measure of time, but I think people need these measures to make goals. Maybe keeping the resolutions is not the point. Is the intention more important than the result? I think so.

So, here are my resolutions for this year. Four of them are more general guidelines for how I hope to live my life in 2013. And only one of them is an honest-to-goodness-I'm-holding-myself-accountable resolution: 50 books and 50 movies in one year. I've tried to read 50 books in a year and "failed" but even failing means reading 35 books and that's not all that bad. This year, I'm making the effort more official by joining the fifty.fifty.me challenge ((oh, hey, if you sign up, let me know!!) and keeping track of my progress on this blog.

Happy 2013!

Comments

[Sarai]

Are you on Goodreads, Kayte? I've found it super helpful for keeping track of what I read!

[this is loveforever]

Hi Sarai! I am, but I always forget to check in on there. Oh, so many social media sites!!

[Melissa]

What an excellent collection of resolutions! I particularly enjoy the rhyming of open my heart, make more art. That could be a great inspiration for graphic design!

[this is loveforever]

Thanks Melissa! Glad you liked that little rhyme...

[Katie]

Kayte - I VASTLY prefer LibraryThing to Goodreads. I find the caliber of books and recommendations on goodreads to be very poor on the whole, whereas the LibraryThing readers tend towards literary fiction and some very literary sci-fi/fantasy stuff. (I tend very much towards the former.) If you like stuff like Erdrich, you'd probably like a lot of what you'll find on LibraryThing.

Their recommendations have been really good, and that's actually how I found Cutting For Stone, which is probably in my top ten list for the past decade - certainly of contemporary fiction. Also, just browing users with similar books to oneself on LibraryThing tends to net a lot of great stuff. I found Jane Gardam there - you might want to check out her "Old Filth" and "Queen of the Tambourines" - both are fantastic (give Queen at least fifty pages - when it starts it seems gimmicky and then it is most emphatically not) and it seems no one has ever heard of her on this continent.

[this is loveforever]

Thanks Katie!! I will definitely check out LibraryThing. And I will check out your book recommendations as well!