Deal me in!

January 4, 2011 at 7:33 am (Uncategorized)
Tags: reading projects, short stories, short story recommendations

Fellow blogger “Prongs” – of the Padfoot and Prongs blog fame – posted recently about an idea she had. Her goal is to read 52 books this year (not coincidentally, that’s one per week, isn’t it?), and she already has a list of books she plans to read and has left room for a few “wildcards.” This last term is quite appropriate, as it ties in with how she is going to randomly select which book to read next. She has assigned each book to a particular card in a standard deck of playing cards and will “draw” them one at a time to determine her reading order. (isn’t that great!) At the rate of one per week she’ll be done by the end of the year.

I was inspired to somehow adopt this idea myself, but I wasn’t sure how. I am very “protective” of my reading schedule and don’t like to be bound to mostly obligatory reads. This is why I don’t often participate in challenges or read alongs. Also, I don’t often have a whole year planned out in detail; sure, I have a TBR list a mile long (like most of us), but it is in no recognizable order (possibly ALSO like most of us 🙂 ). So, I thought doing fifty-two books this year was too restrictive for me. Then I thought, “Well, why don’t I just read (draw one card) once every four weeks and read the related book?” that would let me go through the entire deck in just four years. But then I thought, “Jay, you know you could never stick with any project for FOUR YEARS!”

Then it hit me. Short stories! I love the short story form, and I must’ve read about fifty of them last year anyway! So, I could adopt this (way cool) idea for 2011 and apply it to reading short stories WITHOUT seriously affecting my normal reading pattern. Brilliant!! (lol)

My thought is this, I’ll have each suit represent a category of stories – maybe one suit could be stories that are already in my queue (e.g. The last two Stories in Stephen King’s Full Dark, No Stars collections). Another might be sci-fi or fantasy, another might be re-reads of favorites (ooh, I like that one), but I would definitely want one “suit” to be “Recommended by Others.”

So now I’m off to work to come up with a list, but here’s where I NEED YOUR HELP: please comment and leave me a short story recommendation. I’d love to have one fourth of my stories be recommended by my fellow bloggers. Heck, suggest more than one if you want to. I’ll probably just crate a new page on my blog with the list of what card equals what story as I begin to fill it in. The first two weeks of 2011 I can “cheat” and just finish my Stephen King stories, but after that it’s “game on!”. Who’s with me?