I’m in the mood to take a tiny break from COVID-specific diarizing. It’s like that line from Falsettos,

Let’s be scared together. Let’s pretend that nothing is awful.*

I’ll be back on topic tomorrow, but tonight I just feel like indulging the bookwormy part of my life.

About 6 weeks ago—or was it a decade?—I said I’d dish up my new reading goals for 2020. And then I didn’t, because: heartbreak. Politics. Pandemic.

Absolutely understandable, but hey! Let’s take a little escapist side trip down reader’s lane tonight…

So: the 2020 reading plan (goal?) is a two-parter.

Part 1 is about paying attention to all the books I already own. To try not to buy anything new and instead to read titles from the Life-Exceeding Quantity of books already in the house (including all the digital purchases sitting on my Kindle or in the cloud). And if there’s books I read and then gave away, so much the better!

This strand of activity is one where I’m having very limited success. I haven’t bought too many new books, but I have bought some. Which is more than my goal was to buy.**

The bigger fail here was that lingering obsession I carried through January and February around continuing to play catch-up on the missed books from my 2019 lists. Meaning: a lot of what I read were library books instead of books form the house. And library books are a step ahead of me buying all those missed 2019 titles, to be sure. But reading all those library books is also WAY off-course from my initial plan.

Part 2 of the 2020 plan is one I hinted at a bit ago, when I talked about the small rituals getting me through “these COVID days”:

And every night before lights-out, I read at least a few minutes’ worth of Shakespeare.***

‘Cos I decided to play along with Ian Doescher‘s Shakespeare 2020 Project. The point is to read the entire ouevre in a year. And I’m doing better here than I am with Part 1 of my reading plan:

Admittedly, I’m still 3 weeks and 3 plays behind schedule. In the last week or so, I’ve given myself rather a stern talking to about the silliness of trying to retroactively fix the failures of my 2019 reading goals. So It’s gonna by all Shakespeare, all the time, until I get caught up.

Even being behind schedule, this is still 8 books and 10 plays I could be blogging about—as well as my re-watch of Julie Taymor’s Titus. That is some seriously good fodder to get me back over on Will4Will.

But in my strangely sequential brain, it didn’t feel right to do that escapist writing over there until I closed the loop on my 2020 reading plan over here.

So: loop officially closed. Look for more “Shakespeare Project the second” along the way, even while I keep diarizing over here.

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* For the record, whenever I get to the point where I need to shock myself into the cathartic release of a good cry, THAT is the moment I will sign our house up for Broadway HD, just for the sake of seeing that production and sobbing my fucking eyes out.

** In my defense, February included a possibly once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Powell’s, so I can’t fault myself for buying something there. Right?

*** Even when in escapism mode I can’t entirely forget what’s going on, can I?

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Image credits:

Bookworm by Flickr user Pimthida, via a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license.

Shaky Shakespeare start by author,