I don't do resolutions...

....but as my coworkers and boss can attest to, to-do lists and I are friends. Very good friends.

So instead of 2011 resolutions, I'm crafting a to-do list for 2011. I'm picking 10 things and writing them out -- in a public place where hundreds of people my mom can keep me honest. We'll see how I do. I'm aiming for a 100% success rate; knowing me, 50% will be worth celebrating.

The first item on my to-do list: Update my blog more than once a quarter. Ideally, once a week. So to get started, I'm going to post each of my "to-do" list items as its own blog post. That guarantees at least a few more posts in the next couple weeks. YAY! See, I'm making progress.

So now that to-do item #1 is taken care of, let's move on to to-do list item numero 2:

Stop reading crap (um, hello Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) and trade up for some real literature. Think AP English, albeit 10 years later. There are a million lists of "Top 100 books" you can find online, and on average, I've read anywhere from 10 to 50 of the books on the lists. Yes, this is a depressingly low number for a liberal arts educated chica like myself.

But we're gonna fix this travesty! A few books I hope to cross off (and a couple I want to reread) this year include:

- Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by the great James Joyce. Technically I read this my junior year of HS, but by reading I really mean laying in bed, reading a couple lines and then falling asleep. So yeah, I want to read it for real this year. It's a bitch of a book, but its a lot shorter than Ulysses, so I think I can do it. (DISCLAIMER: I'll bet you 10 bucks I don't make it past page 5 of this book. Just putting that out there now.)

- Native Son. Another book I read -- this one for real -- but I can't remember much about it. I do remember it making an impact on me when I finished it at 16, so I think rereading it 12 year later would be even more powerful.

- A Passage to India by E.M. Forster. I LOVE Forster, which makes it all the more ridiculous that I haven't read this book. My high school thesis was even an analysis of his earlier work (A Room with a View, Where Angels Fear to Tread, I think Howards End...). Anyway, I really don't think I've read A Passage to India, which I must read this year.

- A Farewell to Arms. I have nothing to say about this one except how sad it is that it's on this list.

- The Catcher in the Rye, 1984 and Animal Farm. See above comment about Hemingway. I have no idea how I reached the age of 28 without reading these books, but I did.

- The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton. I love NY, I love the 19th century, I love societal tragedies. Done, done, and done.

- Slaughterhouse-Five. Looking back, I think all of my ex boyfriends owned this book. And since they are all pretty smart dudes with good taste (after all, they did all like me at one point!) I'm gonna trust that this is one book I should read.

- War and Peace, by Tolstoy. I think this book is buried somewhere in my bookshelf. All 1,500 pages of it.

- Les Miserables -- but not in English! I wanna read it in French. (However, given that I can barely read a French newspaper now, I think this book will remain on the list for 2012.)

There are about a million other books I should read -- but we'll start with the ones above. Any others I should definitely add?