Goals are a good thing. I may have set mine a little high this summer. I have all the mundane, every year goals. Not allowing all the dozens of plants that I have planted and potted to perish in an act of spontaneous combustion, due to non -watering. Spend more time outside and less inside in front of the TV. Take long walks after supper…you have heard or have had these same goals and more like them. Don’t ask me why, but for some reason I thought I needed to set the bar a little higher this year. I decided that I was going to read one book a week this summer. Now that sounded so great…even Oprah-ish – but had I lost my senses? That means that I need to complete 14 books by Labor Day!
Of course, goals like this are always set in the heat of the moment. I was blazing through my first summer read when I came up with this bright idea. Sounded like it was going to be a walk in the park. Little did I think about how lost I get in a good story. The house could be burning down around me and I wouldn’t know it. I read a little when I was a child, but never lost myself in it. Then, raising kids limited my reading to magazine articles, children’s Tylenol dosing instructions and picture books. Time went by and I lost the habit of just grabbing a book and reading for pleasure.
Several years ago I was thinking of ways to recapture some of my daily life back for myself and I came up with the idea of starting a book club. I called a dozen friends and some people I new who were avid readers and asked if they would be interested. We started out with nine of us and made the rules very easy – a set meeting day each month, no set type of book, we each take turns choosing three books selections to present to the group then the majority vote chooses the book we will read for the next designated month. What started out as a way for women to treat themselves to the time needed to read the book and attend the meeting has morphed into a tight knit group of friends that might not have gotten the chance to become so close. As a group we have experienced moving, graduations, sending children to college, empty nest syndrome, divorce, engagement, marriage and childbirth – all brought together by the pleasure of a good read.
I think that the book club may have led me to this lofty reading goal this summer. Every month we have to choose one book from those three great selections, so after the last couple of years, I have gathered quite a few book titles that sounded interesting, but I never had the time to get to them. It also doesn’t hurt that Amazon Books makes it so affordable to pick a used copy of almost any book and have it shipped to your hot little hand for usually under seven dollars.
Well, I am at the end of week eight and I have just finished book number nine. Don’t cheer for me yet. I am usually great at the beginning of a challenge. It is in the home stretch that I have been known to lose a little momentum. Due to my history with goals, I just wanted to attempt to give myself a head start.
