Day 555/1,000 of Bradbury Reading Program
Read one poem, one essay and one short story a night for the next 1,000 nights
Just wanted to mark this milestone. I moved all my lists of titles into a single spreadsheet and will try to make more progress this year.
Today’s texts: the poem “Wonder Woman” by Ada Limón, an essay called “Empathy Maps” by Arlie Russell Hochschild and two short stories from Best Canadian Short Stories 2020: “Your Random Spirit Guide” by Eden Robinson and “Drago” by Michael Melgaard. Yes I do occasionally read more than one category per day. (The Robinson story was a single pager so I thought I’d add another)
It’s a fun way to try collections without committing to reading the whole thing, but if you do want to finish it, each day is slow, incremental progress. I’ve occasionally done an all-Canadian text month and an all-Filipino text month (much more difficult to do as a migrant, but very interesting)
Some days what I read does not leave an impression, but other days, I find texts that really resonate, authors I would want to read more of and collections that I love.
These days reading can be such a performative thing if you’re posting about it on social media (like I’m doing) and there’s a lot of discourse about numbers and comparisons. But this project is just something I wanted to do for myself, a way to learn about each genre without being too prescriptive. I did start lists early on but abandoned them because I like the freedom of just trying things.
But if you want to share the names of your fave poets, essayists and short story writers, I’d love a recommendation.
