Race to 52 - 2 days remaining

I should have gone with The Reef. Those 336 pages would have been more manageable than the 500 pages of Executive Power. Edith Wharton is certainly literary but she is not a challenging writer. Her books are easy to read. Vince Flynn wrote to entertain so his books go very quickly, but quick does not cancel out the heft of Executive Power. I should have applied the lesson of The Caine Mutiny and picked short over entertaining. Oh well, too late now. And what difference does it really make. I have absolutely nothing riding on this goal other than meeting a promise to myself. If I miss my target the world will continue to spin. This will be my high watermark for books read in a year for quite some time. I want to set it as high as I can even if there is no material impact on my life if I can't crack 50.

I will crack 50. I'm going to finish Swann's Way. I have 40 some pages to go. I will know if I have a shot at finishing Executive Power by the time I go to bed tonight. If it looks like I will miss Executive Power, I will put everything into Swann's Way. I'm going to keep pushing on both. I'm not going to give up until it's undeniable that I'm not going to make it 52 books this year. 

If I do manage to get to 52, I will start 2017 in an unprecedented position. I will have no books in progress. I can't remember the last time this happened. I usually have a couple of books going at any time so starting totally from scratch will be a different experience. Making the choice of what to read will be careful and deliberate. I usually just grab whatever looks good from my shelf and go. I want to stop and look back over what I have and pick something that has lingered and floated around the maybe I'll read that soon space and actually read it. More on this later. Right now, I need to get some reading done!

Update: I cheated a bit and read a decent chunk of Executive Power at work. Then I managed to have some Family Reading Time (FaRT) after dinner. I used FaRT to get in a few more pages of Swann's Way. I only have 30 pages left in that one. I can get that done in the next two days and still have plenty of time for the not quite 200 pages left in Executive Power. I was doubtful this morning, but I did what needed to get done for me to get back on track.