10 June 2007

An intro

I set myself targets - books to read, films to watch. This is mainly to stop myself getting lazy, to impose an informal structure on my cultural life, so that at the end of the year I can consider I've made some progress, if only in reducing the book mountain.

Of course, that's a futile effort - I have about 1800 unread books here, and buy about 200 more per year. My target is 2 books per week, which isn't sufficient to stop the mountain growing. I also have about 100 unwatched films, which is more manageable, and my film target is about 150 per year - one per week in the cinema and two per week on DVD, roughly.

I also set myself projects. Currently I'm reading a lot of 19th Century French literature, and watching German films - Fritz Lang, FW Murnau and others. I alternate the French stuff with modern, and with non-fiction.

I usually write my reviews of what I've watched and seen on the Guardian Unlimited talkboards, where a couple of people read them, I may get an odd comment, then they sit on the thread until deleted. So I thought maybe it would be better to set up a blog to collect my reviews and thoughts. And this is it.

[edit] I've decided, for ease, to separate the books from the films.

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