Happy New Year

Bang! Pop! Wooooooooo! Phish!

If you didn't guess those are the sounds of fireworks going off to herald in the New Year. Hope you handled your fireworks safely. Now I've done my bit for public safety awareness, I can sleep tonight knowing that scores of people may have been saved by my aptly timed advice. I think I needed to emphasise the "may" in that sentence there.

Moving on. So, what has the New Year got in store for this merry little blog? Well, this year I’m going to set myself a challenge. It’ll probably go down like all my other challenges I’ve set myself during 2009. But, this is 2010, and we must have hope and courage and perseverance if we are to succeed. This challenge is to—wait for it—do something (yes?) amazing...spectacular...awesome...something... You know what I’ve done, haven’t I? How silly of me. I’ve made a huge thing of this challenge, and now you’re probably on tenterhooks to find out what it is (see note below). The thing is, this challenge isn’t the huge, spectacular thing I’ve made it out to be. But I’ve managed to delay saying what the challenge is by seventy words. Seventy-one. Okay, the challenge is to read twenty-six books in 2010. Why twenty-six books, you ask. Well, as there are fifty-two weeks in a year, that makes a book every two weeks. I’ve already got a few titles of books I want to read. These include Looking for Alaska, by John Green; Brighten Rock, by Graham Greene; and Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens. If you have any suggestions, suggest away.

So there we have it: 26 books in a year. Hopefully I will have finished Doris Lessing’s, The Good Terrorist, by then. Hopefully, I will have a little widget which will tell you what the book I am currently reading is. I shall also write some short reviews/commentaries.

See you later, terminator.

Note on “on tenterhooks”: While writing this post I got curious on where the phrase “on tenterhooks” originated. First, I discovered it was tenterhooks and not tenderhooks. Basically, in the olden days, after spinning wool they had to wash it. Then they had to dry it, but so that it didn’t shrink they hung it up on frames. These frames were called tenters, and the hooks on them were called tenterhooks. It isn’t a huge leap of the imagination how being strung up on tenterhooks can be used as a metaphor for anxiously awaiting something. Now, hopefully you read this bit before carrying on with the rest of the paragraph, so I delayed you finding out about the challenge by a further 124 words. Gutted. 126.