Planning for 2019

At the start of each year I like to set aside some time to reflect on my reading habits and prioritise my reading for the coming year. Today I spent some time perusing my bookshelves and sorting out my books. In doing so I found a range of titles I had forgotten about that I am still keen to read.

I have cleaned up my bedside cabinet of all unread or half-read books that will not be prioritised for 2019 and set up a new 'to-be-read' stack of physical and ebooks. This teetering tower currently consists of:

• Becoming by Michelle Obama
• The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
• Stoner by John Williams
• Warlight by Michael Ondaatje
• Elizabeth Costello by JM Coetzee
• The Iliad by Homer
• It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis
• Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene
• Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth
• Cosmo Cosmolino by Helen Garner
• Outline by Rachel Cusk
• The Journalist and the Murder by Janet Malcolm
• Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
• The Long Prospect by Elizabeth Harrower
• Hold Your Own by Kate Tempest
• The Years by Virginia Woolf
• Educated by Tara Westover
• The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
• The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
• The Power by Naomi Alderman
• The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith
• Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
• Sing Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward

All books will be blogged about here and you can check my progress on My Challenge page. Of course I should note that I always go off course with my reading, and undoubtedly half the titles above will be shelved and replaced with other more urgent books. But it is a plan nonetheless. 

This year my main focus is on fiction and I am aiming for a target of 30 books in 2019 - which I didn't reach last year but I am still determined. To help me achieve this goal, and ensure my reading remains diverse, I have created a new Bingo board to stretch myself into new areas.

B	I	N	G	O
19th Century Classic	First Novel in a Series	Adapted into a Film/TV Show	Australian Literary  Prize Longlister	Short Story Collection
Essay Collection	Set in Space or at Sea	Pre-19th Century Classic	Fiction Based on a True Story	Current Affairs / Politics
Book on the 1001 List	Banned Book	Features Strong  Female Protagonist	Set in the Future	New York Times Bestseller
Spin-off on from  a Classic	Mystery or Crime Novel	Booker Prize  Longlister	Published in 2019	20th Century Classic
Legal Thriller	Biography  or Memoir	Set during Wartime	Poetry  Collection	Book with a  colour in title

There are some books coming in 2019 that I am excited about too, like Ian McEwan's Machines Like Me, Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, Elizabeth Gilbert's City of Girls, Jane Caro's Accidental Feminists, Gerald Murnane's Green Shadows and Other Poems, and plenty more.

So, let the adventures in reading begin...