I did something the other day that I haven’t managed to do in years:  I cleared out my Unread Books shelf in my bedroom.  It has been damn near a decade since I had less than at least a couple of books on that shelf waiting to be gotten to, and there have been plenty of times where the shelf was literally the entire shelf.

What can I say; I buy books.  Lots of them.

Anyway, I had a problem: the last book on that shelf was Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, which is a book that I both 1) ought to read and 2) genuinely want to read.  However, I’ve discovered over the last few days that I absolutely do not have the necessary headspace available to handle reading Hannah Arendt.  This is depressing but true; I can’t do heavy nonfiction right now, and heavy nonfiction about antisemitism and totalitarianism is just not a thing I’m capable of.  So that’s gonna end up DNFed until I’m in a place where I can reflect and think more clearly.  I’ll get to it eventually.

Last night as I was having those thoughts about reading it occurred to me that somehow, despite being a fan of science fiction and fantasy for forty years, I’ve never read anything by Terry Pratchett.  I quickly downloaded The Color of Magic to my Kindle and read the first hundred or so pages last night.  And, well, now I think my project for 2017 is going to be to read every single Discworld book.  This somewhat conflicts with my previously-set goal to keep books by straight white men to no more than 30% or so of my reading.  I may amend that to no more than thirty percent of the authors being straight white men.  This sort of feels like a cheat but it’s my goals and my rules and I figure I can probably change them on the fly if I damn well feel like it.

What do you think?  Is 2017 the Year of Terry Pratchett?  Should I go for it?