Happy new year

For those of us who measure the passing of time by the first pitch of successive baseball seasons, our annual celebration is now upon us. Tonight, the boys of summer return. Even better for those of us who plead allegiance to the vaunted red B, they will descend upon Fenway Park in Boston, where the hometown Red Sox host the World Series champion New York Yankees. (My fingers nearly mounted a mutiny as I finished typing that sentence.)

With a pitching rotation that includes newcomer John Lackey, Josh Beckett, and Jon Lester as the first three starters, the Sox are looking to be a team of solid defense and great pitching. For the first time in recent years, however, Boston's lineup is looking vulnerable. We'll need either a few career performances from unexpected players, a major acquisition sometime prior to the trading deadline, or both. For many years, the Sox used to be a team built to make it to the playoffs but without the depth to last once they got in. This year they may have the opposite problem.

Tonight, at 8:05 PM, be near a TV. Josh Beckett. C.C. Sabathia. Red Sox-Yankees at Fenway Park. And happy new year.

Meet 'n' greet

I'm not a big fan of New Year's Resolutions. I don't have anything against them per se, but more often than not they end in utter failure. Of these failures, perhaps none is greater than the fact that even these annual self-betrayals are insufficient to convince us not to stake our hopes on such flimsy, quixotic fantasies the following year. And so the cycle endures. It is for this reason that, heading into 2010, I had yet to resolve anything on New Year's Eve. I may not be a dreamer, this is true, but I'd yet to disappoint myself either.

In this sense, then, New Year's Day 2010 represented a bit of an anomaly. For in the waning hours of December 31st (or was it the first hour of January 1st? I can't remember), while carousing atop a Hong Kong mall directly under the celebratory pyrotechnics, I made a resolution. (Actually, I made several, but the other ones are neither appropriate nor relevant to this space.)

I resolved to read fifty books this year. Now, I have no idea how many books I read last year. My guess is it's somewhere in the thirties, counting assignments for school. But this year, thought I, it was time to up the ante, to stretch myself to hitherto unimagined heights, to set my literary gaze aloft to dance with the stars.

OK, so this is not true. I have no such literary pretensions; in fact, my frustration with an inability to grasp even basic themes and motifs in literature is one of the major reasons I resolved to read fifty books this year in the first place. And I decided to blog about it in large part as a safeguard against giving up in my quest. (Objectively speaking, a blog may not be the best safeguard either, as I've rarely been able to maintain one for longer than a week. But no matter.)

So yes, I am blogging about the books I read and, if I'm lucky, I'll be able to capture a little bit of the excitement of the journey as well as the thrill of the books' content itself. I aim to read both novels and non-fiction, and I am very open to suggestions at any time for what to read next. (I never own more than a few books ahead of the current one I'm reading.) My only rule is no paperbacks with glossy color photos and the author's name printed in slightly raised lettering. Other than that, please feel free to leave comments (as many as you would like), suggestions, etc. If reading is a journey, let's make it a road trip. Because everyone knows road trips are a lot more fun when you don't do them yourself.