Sunday, April 8, 2012

Do or Do Not, There is no "Try"

In the middle of March, I noticed that Katherine of Totally Filmi was using the #fiftyfiftyme hashtag in her Twitter stream. Being insatiably nosy, I followed it up and discovered the 50/50 Challenge - and what a challenge!

I love reading, and quite literally cannot remember a time when I couldn't read. Tragically though , I  was born with a crippling congenital laziness and a debilitating genetic predisposition to chronic procrastination. To fight these disabling problems, I decided to take the challenge, despite not joining until 3 months of the year were already gone. It's my hope that the challenge will force me to read more books* rather than just web pages and blogs. I've set myself the goal of "majoring" in Terry Pratchett, which means  reading at least ten of his books. This would take the number of his works I've read to 29 or 30 in total. I'm going to "minor" in books on linguistics, for a minimum of five books from this field. I have two underway at present.

The challenge is also providing some structure to my viewing of DVDs. I'm majoring in Hindi movies, and in fact, I'm only counting non-English language movies toward my 50 movie total. My minor is Nandita Das films, so I have to watch at least 4 more of her films to meet that requirement.

I will post brief reviews and ratings of the books I read and the movies I watch here, once I figure out how I want to rate them, and some of the films I watch will receive more in depth coverage at my primary blog, Likhaavat. The first of these is already up here.

I hope that any readers, here or there, will help keep my nose to the grindstone by commenting on my progress and responding to my reviews, so that by the end of the year I can  have met the challenge, and heeded the Ancient Anastrophic One's famous axiom above.  In the meantime, I'm looking forward to many months of fun and personal growth. Thanks for stopping by, and please feel free to help whip me into shape for the challenge!

* I am not one of those literary luddite snobs who don't count e-books as "real" books. I expect that anywhere from 60-80% of the books I read as part of the challenge will be on my Kindle,  especially the Pratchett ones. Whatever the self-yclept purists think, e-readers have been great for rekindling (couldn't resist!)  interest in reading, and I love mine. 

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for signing up with us! And like I said on your other blog, you should guest post about Hindi movies for us!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, I'd love to! I will try to come up with something worthwhile over the next 5-7 days.

      Delete