Let's see . . . one post since November 29 . . . including ALL of December taken off . . . I guess my need for a good, long vacation, coupled with my exotic fear of overexposure in print, has left me tanned, rested, and ready to resume my 52 post per year pace which has no doubt left The Three of You™ with heads spinning.

So we'll take a brief detour from the ongoing excitement that is my top ten list of brushes with greatness to pursue another list of sorts.

In December of last year while most of you were slaving away foolishly at keeping your blogs and readership growing, I was branching out and basking in the Columbus-like discovery of new blogs to add to the good ship aggregator, RSS NetNewsWire. To date this jewel of the blogging fleet is a Mac-only application. Worshippers of the Dark Side eat your hearts out.

During this quest I discovered a site whose name I have since forgotten but whose author was bearing down to the finish line of a very worthy goal. He had determined in January of '05 to read and finish 50 books. (He just missed it at 49. You'd think he could have snuck in The Little Engine That Could on New Year's Eve.)

Now there was a time in my life and perhaps yours, dear readers, when 50 books would have been a drop in your literary bucket.

"50 books? P-tooey . . . I hawk a loogey in your general direction you spittoon of a goal. I can and will read 100, 150—perhaps ever 200 books just to show you who is the intellectual giant around here."

Certainly those are numbers easily attainable by The Teenager, whose self-fulfilling email address is noveleater@************.something . She devours books. She inhales them like carnivores breathe in huge chunks of uncut steak. 200 or perhaps 250 books read in one year might begin to approach a worthy challenge for her annual book consumption.

But as an adult with a job, social commitments, family needs, and 79 other types of media pulling on my sleeve begging, "Pick me . . . Pick me!!!!" I  find 50 to be a monstrous challenge—the Mount Everest of word digestion goals.

And so I have set 50, in this my fiftieth year on earth, as my hill to either climb or die on. To date, I'm doing fairly well, though, at the moment, just a tad off the pace having finished only four volumes.

Because I know that each of my Beloved Triad® lives and dies with discovering the minutia of my life, I will be revealing month by month how I am doing and what I have read. Without further adieu I now present my Books For the Month of—well, wait just a minute. Let's enjoy just a bit more adieu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . fine—now let's go to my list of Books I Read in the Month of January.

1. American Scream: The Bill Hicks Story by Cynthia True (finished 1/9/06)

2. God's Debris by Scott Adams (1/17/06)

3. Don't Eat This Book by Morgan Spurlock (1/19/06)

4. Right Turns by Michael Medved (1/28/06)

I have hundreds, nay, thousands of books at home and even more on my amazon.com Wish List. So how any one gets picked, let alone read, let alone finished is generally beyond my understanding. Much of it has to do with which books I happen upon when I've just finished one and begin to scout another. I do find, however, that books have the best chance of being read by me during their first two weeks in my possession. After that they are relegated to the back list where each can languish for years in the relative obscurity of my bookshelf.

By the way, each of these books were wonderful. I enjoyed them immensely. Not a stinker or a clinker in the bunch. I imagine I'll have some sort of awards show in late 2006 for the best of the best. Perhaps we'll have a party and invite all the authors—a nice, tasteful affair with just The 54 of Us™.

Betcha can't wait for that, eh friends?