New Lists

Ear­li­er this year I final­ly fin­ished a book list from the Sci­ence Fic­tion Book Club, and since then I’ve been search­ing for anoth­er list to cut my teeth on. I’ve final­ly set­tled on one. I’m going to watch every movie issued on DVD by The Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion. To eas­i­ly keep track of this, I’ve made a page list­ing the cur­rent spines and the dates I’ve reviewed the films. Three or four are already list­ed. I’m actu­al­ly already ten per­cent done, as I’ve seen a lot of the Japan­ese films, noir and some of the French New Wave stuff on the list [30 all told]. I fig­ure if I watch one movie a week, I’ll fin­ish the list some­time in the next six years.

I’m also con­sid­er­ing that I might start to read all of the lit­er­ary col­lec­tions pro­vid­ed by the Library of Amer­i­ca, which is a non-prof­it preser­va­tion pub­lish­ing com­pa­ny. I’ve looked over their cat­a­log and it seems to be a quite var­ied selec­tion of Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture, much of which is unfa­mil­iar to me. If I start work­ing on that list and have a goal, I’ll be much more like­ly to buck­le down and read some Her­man Melville or William Faulkn­er. I believe they only have about 155 spines in their cur­rent cat­a­log, so I think I should be able to go through that in a sim­i­lar amount of time as the Cri­te­ri­on list. I must be crazy.