As November’s reads settle out, the 2010’s reading challenges fall into line, and in quiet moments I am reflecting on the reading year and making bookish plans for 2011.

You know how it is? How many bookish promises we readers make to ourselves, before the reader’s fickle gaze shifts to another paged beauty?

In December I’ll be finishing up a few lingering challenge reads, but mostly I’ll be making plans.

One thing that I’m planning to begin in January is a short story reading project. I want to read through a Canadian author’s short fiction, from start-to-now.

Not so quickly that the stories become a blur, but not so slowly that I can’t appreciate the interconnections between the stories either. Maybe a story each week, if they’re long, like some of Alice Munro’s are. Maybe two, if they’re short, like some of Carol Shields’ stories are. About 30 pages a week, I’m thinking.

Alice Munro. Carol Shields. Margaret Atwood. Mavis Gallant. Alistair MacLeod. Timothy Findley. Authors for whom short fiction was not something casually produced, at the one-off request of an editor. Authors whose short stories are multi-layered and as complex as novels. I’m already planning to read collections of stories by contemporary writers, so for this I have an eye to the traditional, canonical-ish Canlit stories.

Is it possible? To read all the way from Dance of the Happy Shades through Too Much Happiness? Or from The Other Paris through Going Ashore? I’m not sure. Whether some are rereads or not, it’s still a lot of reading. And a long commitment.

But I’m sure I’d more likely succeed if I had company, so I thought I’d ask all of you if you’d given any thought to a project like this?

November’s Random Stats:
Book Read, Most Likely to Reread  – Laura Miller’s The Magician’s Book
(I’ve already reread sections of it countless times)
Book Read, Least Likely to Reread – Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts
Most disconcerting read – Jane Gardam’s The Queen of the Tambourine
Most recommendable read – Cynthia Flood’s The English Stories
Token Non-fiction – Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma