Dilatory reader, thy name is chagrin

While browsing through my own archives to find older posts about Christmas in Poland, I ran across a post entitled "Looking Ahead". Written almost exactly one year ago, I showed a (very tidy) picture of my to-be-read shelf, and laid out some of my reading plans.

Woe, woe is me to realize just how far short I have fallen of accomplishing what I must have thought was very doable in 2007. I abandoned The History of Henry Esmond (with very little regret). I am still wading through Dawn to Decadance, far, far behind schedule. I never finished The Literary Discipline, although I think there is only one essay left to read there. I read neither the Northrop Frye book nor the Thomas Cahill title.

I also did not read Thinking Youth's Greatest Need, Consolation of Philosophy, or the biography of C.S. Lewis. I listened to Villette as an audio book instead of reading Jane Eyre, and I never got around to that "Miss Read" book. Evelyn Waugh and Henry James remain on the "authors I have never read" list, and the Christian fiction titles are among the dust-collectors I posted about not long ago.

Of all the books I mentioned in that post, I did read one (or two--can't remember offhand) of the Chaim Potok books, as well as The Poisonwood Bible and The Fountainhead. I am about halfway through Pickwick Papers, and it will probably be carried over into the new year (it is over 700 pages long).

The best-laid plans of mice and men, and all that. I will be posting soon about what I did read in 2007--it's not as if I didn't read anything at all--I just didn't read everything I planned to read.

So, the $64,000 question is...do I bother planning for 2008 at all, or co będzie, to będzie--the Polish version of que sera, sera?