A Totally Practical Game-Plan for Reading All the Books

from Hyperbole and a Half

I have this problem. It’s that I’m already in my 30s and I have not yet begun to scratch the surface of The Great Unread (i.e. all those wonderful books out there screaming for me to read them). The Great Unread haunt me constantly.

Yes, I know that I’m only human, but that won’t stop me from trying as hard as I can to read as much as I can. And I’m not even talking about technical manuals and government reports and 18th-century dictionaries. I’m focusing just on literary fiction, sci-fi, biographies, and history….for now.

So since we’re all writing/revising our New Year’s Resolutions, I’ve come up with some things I can do to read all those books. It’s a “game-plan” that takes into account all those factors that I can (try to) control. I’m sharing them with you now because I like you. You’re book dorks like me


Here goes (from least to most drastic):

I will eat more fruits and vegetables because “They” say that these things are good for you and will help you live longer.

Along those lines, I will eat less of the following: cake, cookies, donuts, muffins, cinnamon rolls, ice cream, chocolate, chocolate, chocolate, and chocolate (although “They” also say that dark chocolate is good for you, so there!)

I will ride my bike more in nice weather so that my body is in tip-top shape and I can live to 800.

I will befriend all doctors who specialize in all the things that might potentially ail me when I am a middle-aged woman.

I will do the Old Jewish Lady thing and keep one-dollar bills and change in random places all around the house and on my person as a kind of savings account, and with that money saved up over 50 years I will be able to buy many, many books without my husband getting mad at how quickly our retirement account is shrinking. And I will be such a constant at the local library that they’ll have books ready for me like coffee for a Starbucks regular.

If all these less-drastic measures fall short, I will befriend someone working in the field of cryonics and have in place a plan for resuscitation every 100-150 years.

I will figure out how to open up a wormhole in space so I can just keep looping back to a particular part of my life to read all the books I didn’t read the first time around.

I will build a time machine and do the time-looping thing.

I will figure out a way to freeze time for everyone else once a year so I can catch up on all that I didn’t get to read.

What are your plans for Reading All the Books? Tell, tell, tell…

(first posted on Book Riot 12/18/13)