A little art and a lot of reading

Last week I managed to join the local Urban Sketchers group, which I'd missed for a few weeks, on an outing to a sporting goods store.  The first thing that caught my attention was a stack of colorful kayaks:

That sketch took about twenty minutes, so I wandered around searching for more subject matter.  I had no idea one of the other sketchers was taking candid photos.  Here I am, looking for something fun to draw...which would have been obvious had the person taking the candid photo just shouted out, "Hey, turn around and look up!"

Eventually, even without any help, I did turn around and look up.  The place was littered with hunting trophies, which some folks may find disturbing, while I just thought of it as a more commercial version of a natural history museum exhibit, and went to work.

It was a fun outing and I enjoyed hanging with the group again -- hope to do it more regularly this year.  (I'm holding two sketches here -- my kayaks, and the sketch done by the person taking our picture.)

Okay, on to a whole lot of reading.  As some of you know, I enjoy having a reading plan.  Last year I tried to read one nonfiction book about each of the 50 U.S. states, and I failed miserably.  I got through Indiana, and it was a struggle.  The books I chose, despite a lot of research and reviews, just weren't that spellbinding.  Sigh.

I also tried a reading "challenge", which various people and groups come up with every year, where they list categories, and you must read a book from each one -- categories such as "Native American author", "horror fiction", "set in your home town", and "recommended by a librarian."   I did succeed in completing one of those last year, only because it had just ten books and the categories were super easy.

This year I decided to set up my own challenge, and a harder one, because I always like to have at least one pointless project to hand (one of these days I'll tell you about my license plate search....).

Since I love nonfiction and didn't read enough of it last year, I decided upon what I call the Dewey Decimal Reading Plan.  Of course you all know the Dewey Decimal system by heart, right?  Melvil Dewey took it into his head one day to invent a classification system for keeping library books in their proper places, and I loved it so much as a child that my personal childhood library was not only shelved according to it, it had handmade tags that I affixed to the spines after carefully researching the proper number to assign.

Yes, clearly I should have become a librarian, and in fact, I worked in the school library as a kid, and had two library jobs as an adult -- in an insurance company's legal department, where I took care of the law library, and at the university department where I was the librarian for a small department collection of books and periodicals until it was de-accessioned.  And now that I'm retired, I get to volunteer at the local library's used book sale room. Yay.

As I was saying some time back, I heart the Dewey Decimal system.  So I found a handy list of all the categories (see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dewey_Decimal_classes) and I chose 40+ of them which I felt might contain at least one book I'd enjoy reading.  And then I went to my library's shelves and had a look.

The first one I found was category 001: Knowledge

I read it, and it was okay, though a bit silly at times and it certainly didn't cover everything.  (I once tried to read The World Book Encyclopedia, but only got through volume B.  I did, however, succeed in reading Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, which isn't nearly as long.)

The next book I checked out was from 002: The Book.  It may seem peculiar to read books about books but it's one of my favorite subjects, and this particular example offers a decent survey and comes with lots of pretty pictures.

And the third book I checked out came from category 027:  General Libraries, another topic that never gets old.

I'll admit these early categories are easy, but I have set up some challenges later on, such as 201: Religious Mythology, 320: Political Science (ugh), and 330: Economics (which I actually read a book on last year before coming up with this idea, but that doesn't count, dagnabbit).

Anyway, that's my 2019 reading plan, and I hope it goes better than last year's!