My reading plan for the month of January.

I hope 2014 is off to a great start for everyone. I’m slowly easing into it. Yesterday was exactly one month that we’ve been in the new house and its starting to feel like home, although I do have moments when it feels like we’re just on vacation (albeit a very expensive one).

Did you make any reading resolutions or commitments for 2014?

I am committed to reading more of the books I own this year as well as more classics, particularly those on my Classics Club list. I signed up for two challenges to help me towards this end: Back to the Classics and The TBR Triple Dog Dare. I also signed up again for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

The first book off the blocks for me this year is The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. I’ve wanted to read this book for decades now, but always put it on the back burner due to its length. I loved other long novels such as Clarissa (1,534 pages) and Gone with the Wind (1,037 pages) and decided to start off the year with a long one. After all, its not getting any shorter and I’m not getting any younger.

I’m six days into The Count of Monte Cristo. I’m reading the Penguin paperback edition that I purchased at the Unabridged Bookstore in Chicago last June (my memory isn’t that good…the receipt was still stuck in it). I contemplated reading it digitally, but for me part of the fun of reading a big, fat book is struggling to hold it and lugging it around. Call it embodied reading to the Nth degree. I’m on page 280 as of this morning and so far I’ve been wonderfully entertained with each passing chapter. However, I have a feeling that this is the only book I’ll be blogging about for the entire month of January.

Have you read The Count of Monte Cristo?
What’s the longest book you’ve read?