5. Read Appendix N, (or an updated version)

I used to read a lot.  (There was one summer where I'm pretty sure I did a book a day.)  I'm getting older and I have way more responsibilities than school-age me and reading is tough.

I do read the news every day, and I read a lot of articles related to my work, but actual books are getting rarer and rarer.  Even my favorite authors don't get looked at too much any more.

For a person that loves reading as much as I do, it's pretty pathetic.

So, I have a few reading based goals in my list.

The first is to read Appendix N.

What is Appendix N?  It starts with something nerdy, (which I'll admit, I totally am.)

A long time ago, a guy named Gary Gygax and his friend Dave Arneson invented a game called Dungeons & Dragons.  With sparing you the details of how it actually works, it's a game with three rulebooks.  (One for the player, and two for the referee.)  In the original Dungeon Master's Guide, (one of the books for the referee,) there were a bunch of appendices.  I never read the original, but I do know they went through at least the letter N.

Appendix N was just a suggested list of reading of fantasy authors Gary Gygax really liked and contributed to the stories he wrote.

Here's the original list.

They're up to the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons now and Appendix N is in The Player's Handbook and it's called Appendix E.  It also has a lot more books in it.  (57 authors, many of whom they cite, "the complete works.")

That's a ton of reading.

Granted, some of these books I've read, but it's still a lot to do.

To pair it down, I'm going to read at least the first book in every series they recommend, but except for H.P. Lovecraft, whom I've already read his complete works, I'm not really looking to add any author's complete works to my list of stuff I've read unless I really love what they write.

(So I just cut the list down from hundreds of books, (probably about 300,) to about 100, I'm going to cheat further.  (The cool thing about being older is nobody really cares if you cut corners as long as the finished work is up to par.  Being the arbiter of whether I'm letting myself gives me a good amount of leeway.)

I have a subscription to Audible.  For those of you that don't know, Audible is the world's leading source of audio entertainment.  (Aside from iTunes or Pandora I'm guessing.)

Every month, I get a credit for a free audiobook.  I'm doing the longest books through audible and reading the rest on my iPad.  If something is in the public domain, (i.e., free,) I do the iBooks version.

So far, I'm about 13 authors† in.  (About half of those were read ahead of time, so I've actually audiobooked about six so far.  I'm on the second book of Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy.  I really like him, so I'm, "reading," more.

Also, I still read faster than I listen, (even with Audible letting you listen at 3X speed,) but it's problematic reading an actual book in the car, (the one time of day I have a spare 20 minutes,) so I stick with it.