the rest of it

From October, I've had a long list of things to do to celebrate my remarkable birthday, so it feels a bit redundant to make new year's resolutions. However, some of the bigger things on that list require some planning. So, in order to get those done, I'm resolving to: Put a sewing/making day on the calendar each month (currently down for the first Saturday of the month). Make a plan for my Pessoa reading project: there are about 1,500 pages to read, and I'm thinking of going between the Book of Disquiet  and the biography. At 20 pages a day, that's about 2.5 months. I won't start till I'm back from the US at least, but a bit of me is wondering if I should put it off till Easter break, as the teaching term harms reading time. Must adjust my expectations re number of books to read this year (or find some really short books to bulk up the numbers!) In addition, I want to exercise extra awareness about: Refusing extra packaging. Always having plants in my meals....

Books Better than last year (despite hardly reading at all during the teaching term): 16 books read:  3 fiction: the best of that bunch was Matt Greene's The Definitions , a dystopian novel on a small, personal scale, which plays with and asks questions about language. 5 language non-fiction: by far the best of the completed bunch (but I'm halfway through another great one ) is Michael Erard's Bye Bye I Love You , which I reviewed for the TLS . It's about first and last words, and I am a little bit obsessed about the last-words element. So much to think about in terms of how we treat the dying (and will be treated). Special mention to Kingdom of Characters by Jing Tsu, a history of attempts to adapt Chinese characters to technologies. 8 'other' non-fiction: death was a big obsession in this group as well. My favo(u)rites were: From Ashes to Admin  by Evie King. The stories of a council funeral officer in the south of England: the people she's had to arrange ...