1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

There's a series of books which all have the title "1001 [Things] You Must [Do] Before You Die". There's quite a few--1001 Movies You Must Watch, 1001 Paintings You Must See, 1001 Wines You Must Drink. The list has grown pretty long. The very first of these books that I encountered was this one:

Being a huge bookworm, I decided almost on the spot to step up to this challenge. I love a good book recommendation and figured that having 1001 of them at my fingertips was worth whatever Amazon was selling them for. Plus, that picture on the cover--it looks like a dream vacation to me.

I've owned this book for about a year and made slight progress--I had read about 40 of these books already and since purchasing my guide I've read about 10 more. Although I'm an English major, I was able to preform a quick calculation which tells me that at the pace of about 10 books a year I will never read everything I'm supposed to before I die (I've already wasted over 20 good years). And so, although it's already January 3rd I decided it's not to late to make a New Year's resolution to make a sizeable dent in the number of books I have left to go. Ideally I'd like to knock off another 25-50--maybe kind of a tall order since 50 books this year means about one a week. But we'll see what I can do.

My plan is to use this blog to keep myself motivated and on track (and of course talk about all the hopefully great books I'll be reading!) My best friend convinced me to start a blog a long time ago, and I have not updated it in almost a year. So I also think it's time I made all her wheedling worthwhile. For the longest time I didn't feel like I had anything noteworthy or interesting to blog about, or I would just feel stuck for ideas on what to write. So now, with a fresh topic and little re-modeling, I think Based On A True Story is ready for a new start. I've taken down all of my old posts (info for anybody that was wondering where they went) because I really want this blog to be more focused and I felt the old posts would drag it down. Also I reread them and thought they all sounded dumb.

Here's hoping this plan not only leads me to become a better reader and a better writer, but also shares interesting books with anybody that happens to be reading along!