2010 Reading Goals

[sweet_sparrow]

Does anybody have any speficic reading goals for 2010? Big, small, if it's something you're aiming to do, it goes. Or am I just the weird one out? ^-~ (Hope the question doesn't break any rules, but it is book-related.)

I've set myself a few goals this year, though they're not particularly spectacular.

- read Corvus by Esther Woolfson
- read my coursebooks before term starts
- read more non-native English books

Not too many goals and most should be easy to accomplish, but... Well, they might not be. The last is going to be the most problematic. While I'm not a native speaker, I do read solely in English. Most of the books I have/want are, thus, by native speakers of English and I'd love to have a little more variety in my reading. Broaden my horizons and all. I'm not aiming to make a large chunk of my reading English translations, though, just to make that chunk larger than it is at the moment. ^-^

So. Anybody else have reading goals for 2010? ^-^

(Also, hi! I'm new to the community. ^-^ A really short intro of me/my tastes would be: "I read fantasy and I try to stay as far away from horror as I can. I like my night's rest. I'm trying to branch out my reading into other genres a little more. Other than that, I'm a student of English, focusing my courses on - surprise! - literature." Nice to meet you all!)

Comments

[sweet_sparrow]

Afraid there isn't a whole lot to see (publicly) on mine yet. ^-^;

I admit I know very little about history. (It's fascinating, but I have a really bad memory.) But it just sounds really awesome. ^-^

[scifisentai]

I love history. <3 It was always my favourite subject at school but I was always disappointed that the range of history taught in schools isn't wider. I think from the time I was 14 until I finished university I had to study WW1 or WW2 in some way and it drove me crazy because I knew this stuff already and why couldn't we learn about other time periods?

*sighs* Actually, don't let me start a rant on that because I can go on forever about how there are other periods of history to study that aren't about the world wars and yet they are still interesting. >.

[sweet_sparrow]

I loved one of the history modules I got to do in my last year: the beginning of the industrial revolution (in Lancashire, because the rest wasn't specific enough already). Such a nice change of pace!

If it's any consolation, I can go on and on about how crappy English education is over here. It's... How do you expect kids to learn proper English when the teachers haven't even mastered the language? (We'll just both back away from the educational topics very slowly, shall we?)

[scifisentai]

I can imagine! I had one module at uni about the industrial revolution with a focus on the Midlands, and while the topic itself wasn't that interesting I didn't mind so much because it was something different.

*winces* I wouldn't argue with you. Supposedly someone in my year (around GCSE time, I think) filled out an English exam in chat/text spelling. I don't know how true that is but it still depresses me. :(

(Might be a good idea, yes. :D)

[sweet_sparrow]

Fun history is fun. ^-^ I quite liked the topic, but it was a calm and fairly straight-forward one to remember. (Unlike the Vietnam War, which was the second exam topic.)

At least that was a student's doing? I get to correct 'my' students' textbooks because they're faulty. It doesn't happen on a regular basis, but it's happened enough for me to remember.

[scifisentai]

Agreed. <3 Oh, the Vietnam War is complicated. *headdesks*

Yeah, it was a student. And correcting textbooks? *winces* Ouch. You'd expect textbooks to be better than that.

[sweet_sparrow]

To be fair on the textbook makers, they tend to be smaller mistakes that a non-native speaker will read over because their grammar blends together a little and, to them, the sentence is perfectly fine.

It just bugs me because surely, surely you'd have have your textbook English checked by a native speaker? Costs too much, probably.

[scifisentai]

Probably. :( If it's not cost-efficient and/or too time consuming it won't get done nine times out of ten. :(