Damn, the whole news years thing came and went by and I didn’t get a chance to finish off my end of 2010 review. Still got a couple more posts on this.

Reading

On account of the audiobooks the actual reading of books has somewhat been lackluster. The last book I think I actually read was Amin Maalouf's Origins. Prior to that I finished of Malcom Gladwell's 'What the Dog Saw'. Interspersed I tried getting into 'Black Swan' and the Osamu Tezuka art and biography book with different levels of success. Finally I finished of Beatrice and Virgil, by Yann Martel - which I actually didn't enjoy. As much as Life of Pi blew my mind, Beatrice and Virgil just left me cold. Pretty poor showing. It's not that I don't have a ton of books that I really want to read, it's just that finding the descipline to actually do the reading is a bit difficult.

The countless articles I’ve read online and in the various magazines I’ve bought over the year don’t get counted. The tweets I’ve read and wasted more time on, don’t get counted. That said, I am a bit embarressed to confess that on more than one occasion I would by the Economist (which I honestly believe is one of the best magazines for getting information on what’s going on in the world) and not actually read much of it, past the cover story. I think what I’ll try and do is, once a month try and actually get through an issue of the economist. Every week is a tall order, but once a month should be ok.

I also bought a few issues of Wired. The typical price in Lebanon is 19,000LL, which is approximately $12.5, around 8.5 quid, which is nearly double the cover price. Which is probably why I’m going to try and limit myself to reading this magazine once every couple of months.

I didn’t get into any new magazines over this last year, which is strange. I keep wanting to buy a Computer Arts, or a Mac World or something like that, but always end up putting it back on the shelf, as it just feels like a lot more disposable than the price tag requires.  The one nice thing that gets imported however is ‘The Guardian’ weekly. This is a digest of all the top stories in the Guardian provided in this A4 stapled format, which is easy to digest on a Saturday morning. It’s definitely something I’m considering buying more often in the future.

I guess I’m not being controversial here when I say I’d like to read a few more books. How I go about this is going to be interesting. Maybe I need to train myself to read at least 10 pages before I go to bed, multiplied over 30 days gives me 300 pages, which is roughly the size of an average novel. Sure some books are larger, but we’re generalizing here. Obviously best laid plans and all of that, but it could become a way of life.

It’s an interesting experiment, and will guarantee at least one book a month minimum.