A new plan for a new year

It's a new year, so what (if anything) will I do differently?  I've decided to copy some other book bloggers, who include a summary of the week's posts and/or activities.  So today, I'm showing links to some of what I wrote in this week's posts, as well as telling you about a book I'm about to read.

On the first day of this new year, I posted some "gentle goals" I found online (HERE).  I immediately noticed "Read for pleasure" on the list.  Well, sure, I do a lot of that already.  "Practice gratitude every day" sounds like what I already mentioned I would try to to when I wrote about a Gratitude Journal (HERE).  I posted a snippet from a Book Beginning (HERE), and I mused about a book and a word (HERE).  That's all I posted this week.

The English Major ~ by Jim Harrison, 2008, literary fiction (USA), 255 pages

Folks online say this is a book "for a male audience" and "Cliff’s on-the-road adventures are full of great characters [and] lusty encounters."  So I'm a little hesitant as I begin to read this.  But I majored in English (among other studies) and once had a jigsaw puzzle of the United States.  So I got this book thinking it was a sort of adventure as the main character travels throughout the country.  The dust jacket says:

"It used to be Cliff and Vivian and now it isn't."  With these words, Jim Harrison sends his sixty-something protagonist, divorced and robbed of his farm by a late-blooming real estate shark of an ex-wife, on a road trip across America, armed with a childhood puzzle of the United States and a mission to rename all the states and state birds to overcome the banal names men have given them.  Cliff's adventures take him through a whirlwind affair with a former student from his high school-teacher days twenty-some years before, to a "snake farm" in Arizona owned by an old classmate; and to the high-octane existence of his son, a big-time movie producer in San Francisco.

and Sunday Salon