Bonne année 2020 and reading plans
Happy 2020! As we say in French, Bonne Année et Bonne Santé!
I wish you, your family and friends a Happy New Year 2020. I hope it’ll bring joy and that you’ll be healthy. With joy and health covered, what more can we ask?
We’re starting a new decade and isn’t that great, we get to be in our twenties again!
Thanks again for reading my billets in 2019 and I hope we’ll have a great 2020 reading year together. I’m always grateful for your time, for the engaging discussions and literary finds.
So, what are my 2020 Bookish and Reading Plans?
First of all, 2020 will be Book around the Corner’s 10th anniversary. It’s been an amazing decade of connecting with new people, meeting them in real life sometimes and discovering a lot of new writers. I’m thinking about doing a London Literary Escapade to celebrate, I’ll see if I can organize something.
Then I’ll be reading my Book Club selection for the year. Since I’m going to Montana and Wyoming in the summer, expect a lot of books set in this area or by writers who live there. I’m also doing a readalong with my sister-in-law (Hi, S.!). We have chosen:
- Keep the Change by Thomas McGuane
- The Power of the Dog by Thomas Savage
- The Wrong Case by James Crumley
- The Book of Yaak by Rick Bass
- Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan
- The Lost Get-Back Boogie by James Lee Burke
- Cathedral by Raymond Carver
- Death and the Good Life by Richard Hugo
I hope there won’t be too much trout stuff in these books after my fly-fishing 2019.
And, last but not least, there’s the pesky TBR. This is a never ending story, tattooed in my Excel spreadsheet and on my ankle. I have already bought all the books I need for my book club and the aforementioned readalong. I’m all set. I will read mostly from my TBR this year and will avoid buying books.
But! I already declare two moratoria, one during the Bron book festival and the other during Quais du Polar. (3-5 April 2020, time to buy your plane tickets if you plan to come!) Without this, I’ll break my promise in March. 🙂
I’m sure I’ll have a great reading year and I’m looking forward to it.
This year, I should have more free time to read your posts and follow your reading journeys. Book bloggers are a wonderful community and I always wish for more time to explore what others are up to. In 2019, I participated to several bookish events, like Indigenous Week at Lisa’s, Japanese Literature Challenge at Belleza’s, Spanish & Portuguese Lit Month at Stu’s, German Lit Month at Caroline’s and Lizzy’s, Australia Reading Month at Brona’s. I’ll do my best to do it again.
I wish you again a Happy New Year, full of exciting reading plans and bookish events. Let’s enjoy our literary ride together and forget about this:
Book Around the Corner 
When you get to Wyoming will you tell me if there are whole mountain forests of dead pine trees – it was in one of those books about the gentle forest ranger. Hope you achieve all your ambitions for the year!
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I’ll let you know. There are probably areas with burnt trees since there has been fires in Yellowstone National Park.
I hope I’ll keep my promises to myself and manage to read what I plan to.
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Happy New Year to you too, Emma, and good luck with your plans! And congrats on 10 years – that’s an achievement! 😀
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Thanks. Happy New Year again, Karen.
Re-10 years anniverary: You’re not far behind me. 8 years, no?
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Yup! 🤣
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Bonne Année et Bonne Santé Emma! Congratulations on your anniversary and may 2020 be full of bookish delights 🙂
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Thanks! Bonne année et bonne santé to you too. And Happy Reading!
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I just mentioned in a reply to your previous post that we’ll be taking a road trip through Wyoming and Montana (and Colorado) too in September. I have one more recommendation for your literature of the wild, wild west list, even though it’s set in North Dakota: Larry Woiwode’s Behind the Bedroom Wall, an impressive family saga.
Oh, and a minor correction – Trout Fishing in America is by Richard Brautigan, not Raymond Carver, though it certainly sounds like a title Carver could have come up with.
Happy reading in 2020!
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Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll look it up.
And thanks for pointing out that mistake about Carver/Brautigan, I corrected it. Unfortunate copy-paste incident.
I really hope I won’t have to go through lengthy descriptions of the inner workings of fly-fishing. John Gierach’s book was enough for my taste.
Maybe we can exchange our itineraries by email, if you already have yours.
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I think I can assure you that Brautigan is not going to give you a how-to manual on fishing.
Great idea about the itineraries. We’re still in relatively earning planning stages, but I’ll send ours along as soon as I can.
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Brautigan was once one of my favourite authors, though I haven’t read him for years. Trout fishing was his first written and very idiosyncratic, but so are they all.
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I’m looking forward to it. Brautigan is a writer recommended by Philippe Djian, a writer I love and follow. (You’d like him, I think)
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That’s what I expected. After all, Carver and Brautigan are writers who inspire Philippe Djian. That is a good enough recommendation for me.
Initeraries: contact me when you’re ready.
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In Welsh we say ” blwyddyn Newydd Dda” (the ‘dd’ is pronounced as ‘th’)
I hope Trout Fishing in America is more interesting that it sounds!
Looking forward to seeing more of your posts this year
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Wow, I don’t think I can pronounce Happy New Year in Welsh.
From my understanding, there’s not much about fishing in Trout Fishing in America. We’ll see.
Looking forward to reading your posts too. I should have more time to read other blogs this year.
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Welsh has some difficult letter combinations. It also looks strange because there are some words that don’t appear to have a vowel – the letter y takes on the role of a vowel….
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And how do you pronounce the y? Like in why or like i in quick?
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It varies, just like letters do in French. In a word like Abergavenny (a place name) where it comes at the end it has a EE sound. But in a different place name like Ystrad Mynach it has a u sound like the u in ‘but’ Y on its own means ‘the’
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Thanks for the explanation.
In French, letters are always said the same way. The challenge is to know where the silent letters are. Otherwise, once you know the rules, it’s easy. (Phew, we have enough complexity in the language without this one too!)
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Wishing you and your family a very happy new year! And congratulations on the anniversary – it’s always a pleasure to read your billets!
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Thank you! I hope you’ll still enjoy them in 2020.
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I look forward to your 10th anniversary this year, Emma. Lisa’s as you know was in 2018 and mine last year. I think it’s wonderful the so many of us have stuck around and made this a real community, as well as, I hope, an excellent resource for readers out there. I’d love to know how many non-bloggers we have reading and using our blogs.
Lucky you going to Wyoming and Montana in summer. I have wonderful memories of two family road trips in the 1990s, one that took us to Wyoming and southern Montana (and Teton and Yellowstone National Parks) and the other up to Canada and back down through the north of Montana and Glacier National Park. Such fantastic places to visit. Enjoy.
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I agree with you, a lot of us have been blogging for more than five year. I’ve seen a lot of mentions about blogs that started in 2012, 2013… when their owner mentioned a decade of reading. It is a really strong community.
I hope my blog is only used to get some reading ideas and that nobody uses it as a ressource for serious things like school.
I am looking forward to our trip. It’ll be a nice change of pace from everyday life and it has its literary appeal.
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Haha, Emma. Yes, I’d prefer it wasn’t used that way too but I suspect it is.
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Happy new year!
My only reading plan really is to get back to Proust. I had a health scare late in the year, thankfully quite unfounded but had it gone the other way it would have been pretty serious. When I thought about it Proust was the only thing I really wanted to prioritise if things got bad. That threat has gone away but it did rather focus the mind.
Of course, a month from now I’ll likely be reading volume three in a crime series with interruptions to catch up to some random show on Netflix. What can you do?
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I’m glad to know you’re OK. How many books to have left to finish In Search of Lost Time?
What can you do? Set it as a personal challenge?
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Happy new year of reading to you! I’ll be another French Emma celebrating 10 years of book blogging. I love your points on your pesky TBR, lol
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Happy New Year too, we still have time for greetings, according to French customs.
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