This Year's Reading

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David Allen continues on with more literary musings. Allen wrote in his blog that he's kicking off the New Year with another reading project. Last year Allen read and reported on "Moby-Dick."

This year Allen's chosen another Herman Melville work, this one a collection of stories:

You may recall that last New Year's, I decided to begin an ambitious book, "Moby-Dick," a novel that turned out to well repay the hours (and days, and weeks) I devoted to it.

That gave me the idea of starting one long, classic book each Jan. 1, something to lose myself in during the winter months and to constitute a sort of intellectual self-improvement program. What is Jan. 1 for if not for outsized goals?

I was batting around the titles of various complex novels on my shelves, including "Don Quixote" (bought from a sale table at B&N circa 2001, never read) and "Crime and Punishment" (bought after seeing "Match Point," ditto), before deciding to read a shorter classic book: Herman Melville's "Billy Budd and Other Stories."

The collection Allen is tackling includes a number of Melville's short stories, including "Bartleby, the Scrivner" as well as the novella "Benito Cereno."

You can read Allen's post here, and he invites you to pass on your thoughts and to share your own New Year's resolutions. Or not, if you would prefer not to.