Bibliophile

noun : a lover of books especially for qualities of format; also : a book collector.

I admit it. I love books. Sometimes I buy books just for the sheer pleasure of having more books. Knowing full well that I will probably never get around to reading them. It's so awful!

(by the way, today in my History of the Book class, we went to the special collections in the library to look at examples of the next thing we're studying: "the beautiful book." Obsessed!)

While moving, I realized that 1) I own way too many books,
(case in point--*some* of my books:)

The sad, bookshelf-less ones:

(so, yeah, you get the idea)

and to my chagrin,  that 2) I haven't read probably 1/3 of them. Lame. One of my life goals is to actually read all the books I own (I tell myself as I keep buying more and more of them...), but I haven't been doing a very good job of it.

So the other day I was reading a good friend's blog, and she had posted her reading goals. She is ambitious enough to try and read 3 books each month, which seems insane because she's also a master's student and I don't know where she finds the time. After seeing this and also hearing one of my professors (the one who teaches History of the Book) say that he reads one book per week(!), I started beating myself up on how little I read these days and how, at the rate I'm going, I'm never going to achieve my life goal. But then I realized--I'm in two literature classes this semester! And even though I couldn't care less about one of the classes (sorry, comparative lit, poor little last general of mine), I've still managed to read, since January: 

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (in French, Notre-Dame de Paris), Victor Hugo

Liaisons Dangereuses, Laclos

Candide, Voltaire

The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare

King Lear, Shakespeare

So what if I spark-noted my way through Don Quixote and Faust . . . I'm choosing my battles here. And I just started on Madame Bovary, by Flaubert.

Anyway, I'd say that I haven't done too bad. But school's almost over, and then I'll have no reason to ever pick up a book again (...), so here's the plan.

The goal is to read:

1. a classic (I'm going to start with all of those that I started and never finished)

2. a nonfiction (I particularly want to start reading biographies)
every month.

Two books? That's totally doable, right? I might one day get as ambitious as my friend and add a third book to the mix (a fiction option?! Don't know how strict I'll stay on the categories), but we'll see how this goes first. So if you have any suggestions (especially in the nonfiction genre, though I have this book in mind), please let me know!! 

Also, I'm signing up for goodreads, so if you're on there too, help me out!