Happy new year! As is traditional, if unoriginal, one should recap on the previous year, so here goes...
In terms of resolutions, I tend to set challenges. For 2011 I wanted to:
1) Swim a mile in under half an hour
I did it! I was very, very pleased with myself afterwards. And tired. Really rather tired.
2) Not wear trousers to work for an entire year
A bit of a strange one, but I was sick of the trauma of trying to find trousers long enough/belts/hitching them up/trousers that were not the horrific black of school trousers so I wondered if I could go one year without trousers, whatever the weather. Turns out I am a convert. They are eminently more practical and just generally nicer.
3) The big one - read 40 books in a year
This target changed a few times. From 40 it became 52, then 60, then 65. Final total was 68. I had a wee look at some statistics on Shelfari yesterday, and found that I had read 20,210 pages during the year. Ratings wise, the list is as follows:
1) Dante's Inferno - Dante Alighieri (5/5)
2) A History of God - Karen Armstrong (3/5)
3) The Book of Certainty: The Sufi Doctrine of Faith, Vision and Gnosis - Abu Bakr Siraj al-Din (4/5)
4) A Good Hanging - Ian Rankin (3/5)
5) Islam: A Short History - Karen Armstrong (4/5)
6) Lady Chatterley's Lover - D.H. Lawrence (5/5)
7) The Falls - Ian Rankin (3/5)
8) Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (4/5)
9) The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (4/5)
10) The Book of Mrs Noah - Michele Roberts (5/5)
11) The Plumed Serpent - D.H. Lawerence (4/5)
12) Case Histories - Kate Atkinson (3/5)
13) Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur'an, Hadith and Jurisprudence - Kecia Ali (5/5)
14) The Wise Virgin: The Missing Link Between Men and Women - Annie Wilson (1/5)
15) A Dangerous Delight: Women and Power in the Church - Monica Furlong (1/5)
16) Women in Love - D.H. Lawrence (4/5)
17) One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (5/5)
18) Kidnapped - Robert Louis Stevenson (3/5)
19) Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law - Catharine A. McKinnon (5/5)
20) Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson (4/5)
21) Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf (4/5)
22) Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah - Olivier Roy (4/5)
23) The Virgin and the Gipsy - D.H. Lawrence (4/5)
24) Metamorphosis and Other Stories - Franz Kafka (5/5)
25) Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (5/5)
26) The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy (5/5)
27) A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini (5/5)
28) The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (5/5)
29) The Reluctant Fundamentalist - Mohsin Hamid (3/5)
30) Tortilla Flat - John Steinbeck (4/5)
31) Sons and Lovers - D.H. Lawrence (3/5)
32) Lanark: A Life in 4 Books - Alasdair Gray (5/5)
33) The Yellow Wall-Paper, Herland, and Selected Writings - Charlotte Perkins Gilman (5/5)
34) BUtterfield 8 - John O'Hara (5/5)
35) Jamaica Inn - Daphne du Maurier (4/5)
36) Because I am a Girl - Tim Butcher, Xiaolu Guo, Joanne Harris, Kathy Lette, Deborah Moggach, Marie Phillips, Subhadra Belbase & Irvine Welsh (5/5)
37) Crome Yellow - Aldous Huxley (3/5)
38) Three Short Novels: Heart of Darkness/Youth/Typhoon - Joseph Conrad (2/5)
39) The Castle - Franz Kafka (3/5)
40) The Nice and the Good - Iris Murdoch (4/5)
41) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey (5/5)
42) Hungry Hill - Daphne du Maurier (3/5)
43) Finding Dad - Daniel Lee (5/5)
44) The Rainbow - D.H. Lawrence (3/5)
45) Hotel World - Ali Smith (5/5)
46) The Accidental - Ali Smith (5/5)
47) On the Road - Jack Kerouac (2/5)
48) Sexing the Cherry - Jeanette Winterson (5/5)
49) Girls of Riyadh - Rajaa Alsanea(3/5)
50) Women of Algiers in their Apartment - Assia Djebar (5/5)
51) Feminist Theory and the Body - A Reader - Ed. Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick (5/5)
52) Take a Girl Like You - Kingsley Amis (1/5)
53) Marriage and Sexuality in Islam: A Translation of al-Ghazali's Book on the Etiquette of Marriage fro the Ihya - al-Ghazali, translated by Madelain Farah (3/5)
54) The Rape of Lucrece - William Shakespeare (3/5)
55) A Passage to India - E.M. Forster (3/5)
56) Bodies That Matter - Judith Butler (4/5
57) Gender Trouble - Judith Butler (5/5)
58) The History of Sexuality (Volume 1): An Introduction - Michel Foucault (5/5)
59) Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud - Thomas Laqueur (3/5)
60) Foucault: A Very Short Introduction - Gary Gutting(3/5)
61) Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction - Catherine Belsey (3/5)
62) The History of Sexuality (Volume 2): The Use of Pleasure - Michel Foucault (3/5)
63) Honor - Frank Henderson Stewart (4/5)
64) My Antonia - Willa Cather (3/5)
65) Persopolis - Marjane Satrapi (5/5)
66) My Cousin Rachel - Daphne du Maurier (4/5)
67) Dracula - Bram Stoker (4/5)
68) Oedipus Trilogy - Sophocles (4/5)
Favourites were Sexing the Cherry, Persepolis, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Lanark and Lolita.
Least favourite was Take A Girl Like You because of the ending.
*spoiler alert*
The basic plotline - a girl who was unsure as to whether she wished to lose her virginity or not, wasn't brilliant, but the fact that the ending, in which she awakes in a drunken stupor to find her boyfriend having sex with her and her reaction is 'oh well, at least that's it done with', and no-one seems to see that it is rape, makes my blood boil.
*and done*
For 2012, I am going to keep a 40 book target, with an added caveat of at least 5 books published this millennium, and a 50/50 split between fiction and non-fiction.
Also, I want to swim an iron man distance (2.4 miles) in a single session.
Check back in 2013 (hopefully) for the results.
Anyway - happy New Year to you and yours!
