Foreword

Tony This project started on January 1st, when my wife announced that her New Year's resolution would be to read her way through the Dewey decimal system at our local library. For months, she kept promising to do it as soon as she finished her stack of books to read.

Like waiting to have kids when you're ready, I knew her promises would never be fulfilled. (She's still ready a Tom Clancy novel that she started reading 5 years ago.) So about a month ago, while at our local library, after hearing my wife make her promise to read through Dewey (for the ump-teenth time); I called her bluff and approached my local librarian. "My wife and I want to read our way through the Dewey decimal system." Suddenly, I 'm putting myself into this challenge as well. "But we know it goes from 1-9999. Can you help us find a WEB SITE that details each category?"

It took a few minutes of searching, but she found us some great resources. After noticing that Dewey catelogues book types by tens, we felt that we had narrowed our book focus. Boy, were we wrong.

Under the Dewey Decimal system (DD from now on), the books in section 1-10 range from UFO's, Big Foot Sightings, Orgins of words and sayings, Urban Legends, and imposters to computer hackers, How To cheat at solitatire, and writing in HTML. Suddenly, our focus is to read a book not from every 10 but every 5!

As one does the math, you'll come to find that to read 1 book for every 5 categorical number in the DD, we will both be reading 200 books.

We both started before the creation of this blog, but we still have a long way to go. I am working on my book for DD 6-10. My wife just gave up on her 1-5 book and is beginning another selection. So this will be a long journey; one I hope you will enjoy and maybe one day even try. My ultimate goal is to inspire 1 person to read 1 of the books we have selection and discussed. Reading is the ultimate joy and a dying past time. And with the rising cost of everything, books are not cheap. So maybe one day someone will link to my site, and like Comic Book Guy on the Prisoner episode of the Simpsons, be a little curious to know what all this fuss is about and discover the joys of their public library.

To learn more about the categories of the Dewey Decimal System.

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, Jan In my defense, I have finished hundreds of books since starting the Tom Clancy book. It is just difficult to read Tom Clancy during a war and while under various other types of stress. To me, he's one of those "have to be in the mood for" authors. But once I'm in the mood, I can't put the book down. And in my defense again, my first selection was about 50 years old and smelled musty. I read about half of it, and while it was interesting, it just wasn't worth the effort to kep going.