Make a List

I like lists. I like checking things off of lists.  I keep myself on-task with lists. I frequently think in lists. This paragraph is a list.

I was delighted to discover Maria Popova's post about Susan Sontag's As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks 1964-1980 in which Sontag discusses her compulsion to make lists. Sontag's lists of likes and dislikes were particularly interesting to me, so I made my own in my commonplace book:

Once I got into the flow, I was surprised by the items that came to mind. Books are there on top of the list of likes, of course, and all of the foods to which I am allergic made the dislikes. Speaking of lists, have you made your Summer Reading List yet? I will probably have to edit, but here's mine, in roughly the order I suspect I will read them:

• Beethoven by Lewis Lockwood (my one biog. per month series)
• Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams (for a project)
• Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu by Laurence Bergreen (biog)
• The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser (for that same project)
• Richard Wagner by Derek Watson (biog)
• The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired by Francine Prose
• Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience by Yi-Fu Tuan and Steven Hoelscher
• The Autobiography of Michel de Montaigne (biog)
• How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell
• Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization by Steven Solomon

Okay, then. That's an ambitious list for four months and I'll probably have to edit, but there it is.

The most fun lists to make are those for places I want to go.

Daytrip ideas from my pile of brochures

"I've always wanted to go there!"

I have lists of museums to visit and daytrips to plan, but these are in the form of triaged travel brochures. My Big Trip List is a fluid list, and by this I mean that the items on it don't change much, but the order does. Currently it would look something like this:

1. Peru (jungle, mountains, seashore)
2. Italy (This item contains sublists of cities.)
3. Iceland (organized tour)
4. India (organized tour)
5. London (run around loose and visit museums, etc.)

Before I attended a travel expo in early April, the list was limited to the 'I' destinations. Then I attended a short presentation on Peru which reinforced what I had heard from friends, and this list was reordered. Not being able to schedule or finance any big trips at the moment, I am content to read up on my listed destinations. Someday I will blast off on an adventure and I will be prepared thanks to my ever-changing lists!

Someday Daytrips