My journey to self-betterment begins!

I'm doing this less for spiritual reasons and more for literary reasons, but I'm taking a plunge that I've long intended anyway: I'm reading the Bible, in its entirety. As an undertaking, this seems a bit daunting, but I did a little research and learned that since there are 1,189 chapters in the Bible (both Old and New Testaments), I can read four chapters a day and thus have the whole book done in less than a year.

I'm reading the King James Version, and as of this writing, I'm up to Genesis chapter Nineteen. The folks in Sodom and Gomorrah are about to find themselves in a world of hurt. I read Genesis 18 earlier today, and I found myself distracted by an oddly frequent use of the word "peradventure". That struck me as odd.

And if I'm being honest here, I have to note that I'm not all that fond of God yet, as a character. He seems a bit whimsical in what he demands of his followers, and a bit harsh in his response when he doesn't get exactly what he wants.

I'm also trying -- with no guarantee of success, mind you -- to enrich my reading life by getting into some "classic" book or other, at the rate of just ten pages per day. That seems doable. An entire chapter is often too much for me to read in a day (especially since I'm a fairly slow reader to begin with, and since I almost always have multiple books in progress at one time), but ten pages seems a good chunk of a challenging work. This attempt might fail completely, of course, but it may not. We'll see. The first book up for this treatment? Well, I figure I should take after my own literary Great White Whale, so here I go again into the depths of The Brothers Karamazov. It's time, I think. As I wrote last May:

I swear, this thing sits on my shelf, taunting me: "I ain't goin' anywhere, bitch!" Someday this book and I are going out into the wilderness, and one of us is coming back alive.

You're goin' down, Alyosha K. You and your two brothers.