This morning I read an essay by Elizabeth Berg in which she shares her resolution for 2008: to read more. It’s a really great essay, and I commend it to you.

Interestingly, though, my resolution is to read less. Sort of.

If I can still do math, which is not to be taken for granted, over the past four years (2004-2007) I have read, on average, 61.25 books per year. That is 245 books over the course of 1461 days (’04 was a leap year), or one book every 5.9632653 days.

After consecutive 50-book years in ‘04 and ‘05, I decided that in ‘06 I would cut back and read 40. Instead I read 70. So take my new resolution with a grain of salt. But here is my plan.

A couple of days before the new year I composed on a yellow legal pad what I titled “Daunting Books for 2008.” On the list are about fifteen scary books that had sat on my shelf for years in some cases, daring me into reading them - books with lots of pages and really small print. Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky (704 pages), Paradise Lost by Milton (512), and Christopher Ricks’ Dylan’s Visions of Sin (528), for starters. Or, for example, the book I am currently plodding through: The World Is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman (672).

C.S. Lewis once advised readers that for every contemporary book we read, we’d do well to also read a book by a dead guy, as a way of exposing our own blind spots. I think I could do a better job at that than I do. But I also wonder if Lewis, were he alive today in our increasingly globalized world, might expand that advice. Recognizing that as a Protestant white North American male I read a lot of books by Protestant white North American males, I’m also trying to be more intentional about reading books from people who might see things from a different vantage point, including an assassinated archbishop from El Salvador and an evangelist from Sri Lanka and others as I come across them.

Finally, I’ve decided to follow the Book of Common Prayer lectionary for my daily Bible readings, complimented by readings in the African Bible Commentary, featuring the insights of 70 African pastors and theologians.

I hope you’ll find a rich and rewarding literary journey of your own this year, and I hope we can learn from each other. It’ll be exciting to see the previously uncharted territory into which this year’s readings will lead.