(My usual quick-like-bunny post for Wednesday night apres-rehearsal. Yes, the holiday break is over and choir season has recommenced….)

Anyone who dips into the archives here could pretty easily figure out that, however much I eschew new Year’s Resolutions, I’m all about setting various sorts of goals and structures for myself. From MOOCifying, to Blogging U challenges, to my own self-defined structures (five by five!) — there’s something I enjoy about having these regular sorts of goals and checklists to help me track my efforts and progress in various realms of my life.

So when my friend J. started gathering a group of friends together in Facebook to take on Popsugar’sReading Challenge 2015, you can probably guess what happened next.

I signed on.

Part of this is because the challenge itself is quite intriguingly designed. Rather than a precise list of titles, the checklist (see below) creates a bunch of categories: “a book your mom loves,” “a book with a one-word title,” etc. You get to choose what book to read to fulfill each criterion.

Working in the spirit of my other life “projects” — both the emphasis on loving and appreciating the life I have and also the attempt to curb my shopping addictions — I’m going to try and select only books (paper or e-) that are already in my library, or that are being acquired for authentic purposes. For example, the current book for my local book club is one I recently purchased (the kindle version was on sale for $2!!!), so I’ll be using that to check off one of the boxes on the Popsugar list. Similarly, if there are books I decide to buy to enrich my experience of any MOOC I take in 2015, that’d be an eligible purchase, too.

It may turn out that there’s a criterion here or there I can’t meet with getting something new, but I’ll burn that bridge if and when I ever get to it.

I’m also (mostly) going to try and work the list criteria in order — with some exceptions as determined by external factors. Using the local book club as an example again, the first Popsugar criterion our current selection meets is #9 on the list, “A book by a woman author.” So that’ll be my first check-box, and then I’ll circle back to take on the first check-box for a book that’s longer than 500 pages.

There’s 50 criteria in all, but one of the criterion is to read a trilogy, so that adds up to 52 books. 1 book a week sounds both eminently do-able and absolutely out-of-reach. We’ll see what happens as the year unfolds. Even if I only do half of the checkboxes, it’s still going to be a fun way to inspire me to make some “out of the box” selections out of my home library.

* This is the same J. who helped inspire the start of Will4Will many moons ago…