Christmas Reading Advent Calendar December 1st

I don’t subscribe to any newspapers (other than The Economist which describes itself as a newspaper, although I would consider it a magazine) but every now and then, when perusing a newspaper, usually at my in-laws’ house, I’ll stumble upon a column by someone who is reading a book a day and I’ll think How did they get a job doing that? The obvious answer being they read a book a day.

Well, fine then, I think. I’ll read a book a day too.

This is fairly laughable because I frequently say I’m going to do something every day and then don’t. A perfect example of this: I say I’m going to read a book a day and then don’t even manage to do so on day one. So that’s a spectacular failure right there.

Meanwhile, pinterest and mummy-boards are plastered with Advent Book Calendar posts these past few weeks, the point being to find twenty-four (or five) Christmas themed books, wrap them each up individually, then unwrap them each night to read to your kids, all while posting pictures of a perfectly coiffed family sitting by the fireplace reading Christmas stories all together. This seems quite manageable for me, barring the following:

1. I don’t have a fireplace;
2. I’ve never been coiffed in my whole life;
3. I only have three Christmas picture books, not twenty-plus;
4. I don’t have any wrapping paper;

Spectacular failure two right there.

So let’s smush these ideas together. Let’s see if I can read myself a book a day for an Advent Reading Calendar where the books don’t have to be about Christmas and are basically novellas and graphic novels I have around the house that I’ve never read. Then I can put them in a nice picturey thing like in Major League so that each day the picture gets more and more completed.

Maybe if I have goals, my life will improve.

Or maybe this will be another spectacular failure. It already might be because although I am going to fill out today’s below, I haven’t actually finished reading it yet, but I’m sure I’ll be able to, unless I fall asleep again at eight o’clock like I did last night.

(For my by-email readers, I doubt all the CSS skulduggery is going to work properly in your email, and for that I apologize. Equally, just because the CSS works on my Windows 10/Chrome combo doesn’t mean that it’ll work on your OS/your browser and I did absolutely zero cross-platform testing. But if you’re me, on my computer, hovering over the picture will give the book I read/am reading/am totally not blowing this off am going to finish for each day.)

In any case, behold below Day One and my has a bad word in the title book that I’m going to finish today!

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  The Nigger of the “Narcissus” by Joseph Conrad
  

Advent Calendar images from Minyreve.