a reading plan for 2020: the (second) year of the biography plus... more?

On the final day of 2017, I wrote a short list of people and topics I wanted to know more about, authors I wanted to sample but somehow never did, and unfinished reading challenges: what i haven't read and what i'm not reading (again, a post that had a fair number of comments... still hoping to restore them).**

From there, I dubbed 2019 The Year of the Biography (just for my personal reading, of course). I ended up reading three massive tomes on the lives of Frederick Douglass, Jackie Robinson, and Muhammad Ali.

I also read three graphic biographies: the graphic adaptation of Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl (which I hope to write about), and biographies of Muhammad Ali and Emma Goldman.

These weren't the only books I read in 2019, but they dominated my reading time.

Social distancing and the absence of library books inspired me to purchase three more biographies, and continue the trend for 2020: Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser, Helen Keller: A Life by Dorothy Hermann, and Galileo: Watcher of the Skies by David Wootton.

Only after ordering these did I realize they were all included in that 2017 "what i haven't read" post. To that end, I'm also finally going to finish Taylor Branch's King Trilogy (I stopped halfway through the final book) and Siegfried Sassoon's Sherston Trilogy. (Thank you, social distancing!)

I'd also like to get back to my weekly chapters of Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 and Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 which got left behind when we decided to move west. This, however, might be too many balls in the air.

Taking the advice of a dear friend, I am allowing myself to give up on my elusive Shakespeare project, begun in 2003 and abandoned in 2005, but still nagging me more than a decade later.

** This is not The List. The List is ridiculously long. The List is not so much a to-read list, as a place to consult when thinking about what I might want to read next.