Reading goals for new year

2008 was a good year for reading for me. I read about 85 books. But that's nothing compared to fast readers. See this interview with Sarah Weinman who read 462 books last year. If that doesn't make you jealous, take a look at the comments, where a lot of other people say that they read the same way.

I've read a number of blog posts lately about setting reading goals for the new year. There's a good guide to reading groups and reading challenges here. Some of the reading challenges are one-year challenges while others are open-ended.

John Biesnecker posts his goal of reading 40 books in Chinese. While I'm not that ambitious, it does inspire me to try to read at least a few Chinese books this year. One obstacle to this plan is that it's not as easy to find suitable reading material in Chinese. If you're looking for a fool-proof list of English books, selecting Pulitzer-prize winners or National Book Award winners are all pretty safe. In fact, I'm considering the Pulitzer challenge.

For Chinese literature, a prestigious prize awarded in China is the Mao Dun prize for literature. There are over 30 recipients so far but critics say the award is overly motivated by ideology. A more international prize is the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature. It has only been issued once so far, by that yields a list of seven nominees. Another recently established award is the Man Asian Literary Prize. There have been two years of awards so far, which includes about eight works of fiction in Chinese. A couple of smaller awards are the Dangdai magazine yearly awards, which have been granted since 2004 and the Crown magazine yearly awards. If that's not enough for you, there's a whole list of awards here, but not I'm not sure which awards would make for the best reading.

Of course, picking a book to read in Chinese isn't as simple as just picking a title. I've got to pick books that are not too difficult. So, rather than choosing from a list, it would be smarter to browse the book store or to start by reading an anthology, and to find authors that are interesting and not too difficult. For simple books, it helps to reads books that are contemporary and local (from Taiwan). Books for young adults may also be simple. Perhaps even farther from the goal of great literature, there are comic books.

I haven't set a goal of how many books I plan to read, but expect to see some more posts about Chinese reading on this blog this year.