"Books have to be heavy because the whole world's inside them." - Cornelia Funke

Sometimes, I remember how much I love to read. Usually when I'm reading a really good book. So why don’t I read as much as I used to?  In 2015 I only read about 7 books, most of them over summer, and most I had read before. There is some comfort in re-reading a book – it gives you a foresight that it’s somewhat difficult to have in the real world. I love reading Agatha Christie novels over again and mocking all the characters for not knowing who the murderer is. Idiots. 

But picking up a new book takes a lot more willpower. I might not enjoy it, and...ugh, effort. This year, I'm going to get over that. I've set myself a goal of reading 30 books in 2016. Why 30? My reasoning is that it’s not as daunting as 50 but it allows for reading more than 2 a month during the summer. Still pretty daunting. I had already given myself a head start with a book that I had started reading before Christmas, and I have finished said book and started another, so why is some part of my brain already coming up with objections?

1. Do I really have time to read?
2. Where am I going to get all these books from?
3. How am I going to write a bazillion essays and a dissertation later on when I’m reading all of these books??

The booky part of my brain easily rebuffs these objections:

1. Yes. I’ve been doing not much except watching Making a Murderer for the last couple of days, so…yes.
2. Living next to a map library and studying in the shadows of the university library has made me forget the joys of real, good, proper libraries (although if maps are your thing, I guess the map library falls into that bracket…you do you).
3. If I’ve got time to watch Making a Murderer/countless other Netflix shows and still pass my first semester of Honours, I've got time to read. And I am unlikely to get tonsillitis again this time around.

 I am in my third year of a Linguistics and English Language degree, and while the workload this brings has contributed to my lack of reading for fun, it has also increased my love of language and words and meaning. I love a good sentence. I love good punctuation. I'm just going to say it: I love grammar. Ain’t nothing better than good grammar. I'm looking forward to reading some good grammar.

This blog is going to be…I haven’t quite decided what it’s going to be. Reviews of books with added interesting thoughts and observations?  My aim is to move away from purely reading Young Adult fiction this year, which I have a habit of falling back on even though some of my favourite books don’t fall under that category (e.g. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières, and Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy). Right now I've got a range of fiction and Christian non-fiction to start me off.  I'm also going to allow myself to not like books, and if I can’t stand any of the characters and don’t care what happens to them, I'm not going to feel guilty about not finishing it. I've only ever really, really disliked 2 books – one of them was the second in a trilogy of which I bought all three and can’t bring myself to read the third. It was just so awful.

There. I've written it down so now I have to do it. My next post will be about the books I've read in January, but as a teaser (aren’t you lucky), the first book I finished in 2016 was Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey, and my second will be The Shock of the Fall by Nathan Filer. I've got 10 days to finish it, which is perfectly manageable. I can do this. I can.

Thanks for reading this introductory post! If you have any recommendations for books or feedback on what is my first time writing a blog, I would greatly appreciate it.