#1: Non-religious reading

I’ve seen lots of tweets about people reading 52 books a year; more reasonable people are aiming for 26 books this year. I don’t know about you, but with Gone with the Wind and Les Miserables on my 2010 reading list, I can’t even see myself wrapping up a book every other week. (Les Mis is 1,488 pages; divided by 14 days, that’s slightly more than 106 pages each day. Umm, hi! This is your job and your gym membership and your sleep calling, and no.)

In the spirit of being sane, I’m shooting for a book a month. That’s 12 books, people. And for heaven’s sake, can someone make some book recommendations that are less than 1,000 pages? Or maybe just help me make selections from this list, because I can’t seem to narrow it down.

#2: Religious reading

Disclaimer: I normally don’t talk about religion online, because it’s such a polarizing issue (yuck), but in the spirit of authenticity, this is one of a few brief (and totally non-inflammatory, I promise) faith-related mentions.

After experimenting with a few different “read through the Bible in a year” reading plans, my heart was led to draw up my own reading plan for 2010. In elementary school, and then in college, I spent a substantial amount of time in the early Old Testament — and I’m sure there’s still plenty I can get out of those books, but it didn’t feel like I should be focusing (i.e. getting bogged down) there this year.

I soon realized that there are 260 chapters in the New Testament, which happens to be the same number of weekdays in one year. (52 weeks times 5 days equals 260.) So the basis for this reading plan is to have readings for each week day, leaving the weekends open to catch up on what I missed, or study one of the readings in depth, or focus on teachings from the Sunday message, or something else entirely.

Each day, there’s one chapter from the Old Testament prophets, one chapter from wisdom literature, and one chapter from the New Testament. Aside from placing Job at the end of the year instead of the beginning, everything is in canonical order. If you want to read through the whole Bible (including the Torah and historical books) in a year, you need to add about two chapters a day from those books (or about eight chapters each weekend).

In case this is helpful to anyone else, I created PDFs of the reading plan in a small bookmark format and a larger half-page format.

What are you reading this year?