Welcome to Rabbit Reading Are Cool
Yesterday in the randomised discovery feed, I came across this post from andrewantes talking about Ray Bradbury's wonderful advice to aspiring writers: read one short story, one essay and one poem every day for 1000 days. You can read more about the challenge here
1000 days is a really long time for me but I feel inspired by the challenge, I think it sounds fun. I love reading and read a lot, but I have too many unread books.
I know some people think unread books are good, but the mountain TBR piles make me nauseous. Schopenhauer changed my opinion of book buying when he said "to buy books would be a good thing if we could also buy the time to read them; but the purchase of books is often mistaken for the assimilation and mastering of their contents."
For me, the books most likely to remain unfinished are the big anthologies of short stories and poems, which I usually find in church sales and op shops. These I can never throw out because they always contain some important authors I want to read, but am usually intimidated by. This challenge might be a nice motivation to read some of these writers, and to read more of the books I already own.
I thought of creating some monthly parameters to get me to expand my range of writers. This month until the 25th of April I want to exclusively read non-male authors. Nothing against male writers, I have so many favourites, but its just that as a male reader, 75% of the books I read each year are by men and I want to read more women writers in general, discover some new ones and read some famous ones.
Next month perhaps I will read authors in translation to learn about some other cultures.
ALSO, the stupid name for this blog comes from a t-shirt I bought in a k-fashion store. The shirt does not look good on me, but I like it so much, and it is the only snappy proverb about reading I could think of at the time of picking a title.
