As it is the season for new-year posts on the subject of readings, past and future, I thought I might squeeze out one of my own and perhaps pave the way for actually posting a few times this year. I was fairly organized last year, planning a monthly allotment of books that included an old favourite, a new potential favourite, and something of substance/classic.

It was at times a frenzied race to finish the monthly quota, and between the completion of school and the initiation of full-time employment I am quite surprised that I read as much as I did. But the inclusion of old favourites made the task quite bearable: The Man Who Was Thursday kicked off the year as the epi-tome of Old Friends - no other book can shake my bones and be utterly comfy at the same time. I reacquainted myself with many others, including The Silver Branch (Sutcliff), Mere Christianity, Harry Blamires' Divine Trilogy, The Paradise War (Lawhead), Till We Have Faces, Emma, Lewis' Space Trilogy, Clouds of Witness (Sayers) and Beowulf.

In addition to books that I knew I liked, I tried to include a measured dose of classics that I would not read unless I straightforwardly decided to read them: Hard Times by Dickens, Blithedale Romance (Hawthorne), Jane Eyre by Brontë, The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, and The Last of the Mohicans. I interspersed lighter books with gravity: The Jungle Books (Kipling), Peter Pan, Wodehouse's Damsel in Distress, Patricia A. McKillip's Riddle-Master trilogy, Heartless by A.E. Stengl, and a bit of Conan Doyle's Holmes in the evenings to cleanse the palette.

But the list becomes more and more difficult to organize sensibly. I waded through One Nation Under Gods, a history of the Mormon church by Richard Abanes which was tremendous both in gore and length (but thoroughly diverting). I managed to swallow all three of Harry Blamires' Christian Mind series. I dabbled around with On Poetry & Poets by T.S. Eliot and gobbled up Towards a Christian Poetic, a volume on the nature of literature by an obscure fellow named Michael Edwards. The Song of Roland and Gawaine & the Green Knight joined Beowulf in the tales of Ancient Swashbuckling, while Killer Angels furnished a slightly more contemporary and rifle-ridden version of the same.

The list is winding down. Carl Trueman's Fools Rush In (Where Monkeys Fear to Tread) was just the right amount of heavy philosophy taken lightly. I reveled in Anne Morrow Lindberg's Gift from the Sea, for which my thirteen year old brain had not previously housed enough attention span. And of course, sprinkled throughout, there was an abundance of Chesterton: in addition to Thursday, The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond, The Ballad of the White Horse, The Everlasting Man, The Poet & the Lunatics, and Orthodoxy.

All this list-making is exhausting even in retrospect, and I confess that my stance on the next year is much more lax. I think it can afford to be - I am not bookworking as a full-time occupation at present - and anyway, as Abigail pointed out, one ought not always be cramming books down one's throat. I may trade the intentional reading out for a more intentional framework for writing; who knows? One does not have to make all one's plans by the first of the year.

There will be books aplenty in '13, and I have a fairly good idea of some of them: Signs Amid the Rubble by Lesslie Newbigin, The Gammage Cup, The Worm Ouroboros, and the remainder of Tales of Goldstone Wood. I have Andrew Peterson's Monster in the Hollows on loan from my younger brother. I mean to reread The Lord of the Rings and perhaps some of the broader Tolkien works. There are a few fat volumes of Flannery as yet uncracked, and some highly daunting "furren" works such as Anna Karenina and Les Miserables that I feel rather drawn to...

But who knows? I may think better of others over those tomorrow.