Several times a year I go through my writings without any plan or purpose. I open my website, select a year at random, and then I select a piece of writing, also at random. This is what I just did, too. Although I read only a few pieces, they delighted me no end. The first was from 1994, the second from 1987, and the third from 2000. It was like visiting myself at different stages of my life. And in any which order. But the exercise started me thinking once again about a more systematic effort of this kind. Reading everything I have written “from cover to cover” is becoming just a dream, for it would take a very long time, but I could go through individual yearbooks without much effort. Many early ones are slim enough, anyhow. Most of the late ones are manageable, as well. They would take at most a day to plough through. Something like this strikes me as a perfectly plausible tack at the moment. But I would still need a plan of some kind. How to choose the yearbook to read from cover to cover? How to make sure that I had all the time needed to go through it? And how to manage all the addenda that would surely come forth? Leaving all this aside, the wish to read what I have written piece after piece, in chronological order, from the first to the last, is gradually turning into an urge. A growing urge, to be a bit more precise. If I can master only a yearbook at a time, so be it. But I must start doing it in earnest. And soon.

Addendum (September 8, 2015)

As time goes by, the dream of reading everything I have written from cover to cover is becoming just that, a mere dream. Actually, a pipedream. With more than three-million words, this would take several years at a stretch. Reading yearbooks from cover to cover crosses my mind often enough, but I have not attempted it even once over the years. The main problem seems to be that of choosing the yearbook for this special treatment, and there are forty yearbooks to choose from at present. Besides, the last five to ten yearbooks are too bulky for comfort. Even the shortest among them would take months to read. For all these reasons, I still go through my writings only by means of random searches. Again, I open my website, select a year at random, and then I select a piece of writing at random. More often than not, I am over the moon with what I read. Which is why I go through this exercise more and more often. From several times a year a few years ago, my random searches have evolved to several times a day this year. Predictably, many such searches are crowned with yet another addendum, as is the case right now. As a consequence, the number of addenda has been skyrocketing this year. Within a few weeks, it is destined to become the record year in terms of the number of addenda. At any rate, my random searches through my writings are here to stay, I am quite sure. And my method is very to my liking. All I must do each and every time is to ensure that the search is truly random.