Resolutions: Or, An Adventure in Predictability

1. Apply to a university, or several.
2. Have piano and violin lessons.
3. Have voice lessons (perhaps).
4. Develop some degree of courage.
5. Don't be disagreeable.
6. Don't be so self-conscious in public.
7. Walk more than you have in the past 6 months.
8. Continue learning Russian and Italian.
9. Don't feel sorry for yourself.
10. Read philosophy.
11. Explore the sciences.
12. Do more artwork.
13. Try to be happy or, failing that, resigned.
14. Reconsider the superstition that caused you to add an extra resolution.
15. Write your Great Novel, if you can. (c:
Also attempt some work recounting the legend of Hercules.
16. Improve the pieces that you play on the piano each time you play them.
17. Observe the people around you (without being obnoxious) as much as you can.
18. Don't be a snob.
19. Do some good in the world rather than complaining about it.
20. Donate blood as you intended.
21. Improve your German.
22. Read much more German and French literature. Attempt Trollope, and re-attempt Vanity Fair and Anna Karenina and Tom Jones. Try to read Maxim Gorky and Tolstoy's short stories in the original language by the end of the year. In Italian, work toward being able to read Tasso, Dante, Petrarch, etc. Try Dostoyevsky in English so that you can easily skip over the depressing parts. Try Gustave Flaubert, Don Quixote, and Les Misérables. Read Paradise Lost all the way through, and Spenser's Faerie Queen -- finally. Also on your list:
- all of Tennyson's In Memoriam
- Sir Walter Scott: rest of Waverley novels, Marmion, Lay of the Last Minstrel
- Byron's Childe Harold, Don Juan
- Confessions of an Opium Eater
- more of Pepys's diary
23. Read more about music and composers.
24. Improve your Latin and Greek. Try being able to read Herodotus and Horace's satires by end of year.
25. Read Thucydides, Suetonius, and Cicero's orations.