So, I have an achievement to report. As such go, it's not very much, but I'll splurge on about it anyway.
I get a regular newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). It's one of Germany's premiere national newspapers, next to the likes of Die Zeit, Die Welt, and the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
For many a year, I read this newspaper on a very regular basis. But these last years, it seems I have less and less time... (This must be linked at least partially to this forum
) The first big cut happened in summer 2010, during the football World Cup in South Africa. I had wanted to read at least all the articles on the games, and failed. But I did not throw the newspapers away, but stored them.
I think it was February 2011 then that I stopped reading for quite a long while. Especially when the Tokohu earthquake happened. Over the following years, I on and off resumed reading... Especially during the periods when I worked near Munich in late 2012 and 2013, I didn't have much to do in the evenings and tackled these newspapers. I nearly finished them. Nearly...
Anyway, at the same time, I stayed current. Until, it seems, March 2013. There, I decided to continue reading everything but the title page (which contains politics as well as general news, and usually takes me an hour or so to read). The rest of the paper is usually a quick read, except for Wednesdays, with the Nature & Science section.
But even this principle broke down in late April 2014. I just stopped reading newspapers altogether. This is also pretty much the same time I started reading books again after my multi-year pause...
Newspapers piled up. April 2015 passed, one entire year, nothing was being done. Finally, about a month later, this guy had to come into my apartment to affix some steel slats to the lower window frames. For that, I had to clean up my room, which was a REAL mess at that time...
And one of the first things I did was to collect all the disparate paper piles, remove the sections I was definitely not going to read, then stack them in my bathroom, including the oldest on top, in order.
And I started up reading newspapers again!
I'm pretty sure it was late July when I was really close, just a few issues away from reducing the gap to one year. And then my father died, and I traveled to Trier...
Finally, on October 12th (2015), I got to October 15th (2014)!
And in the following week, I procrastinated quite a bit on other things, and stormed onward - and by Sunday, I had finished 2014!!
I then also added the newest 2.5 months to the stack (it had looked so nicely reduced, sniff...), sorted all of 2015, and also created a single stack of the title pages - that's where I found they reach back to March 2013... And I also discovered multiple completely unread newspapers in there, and then also, that I have some left from April 2011, from the old catching up...
Oh, well! It shall get done!
Meanwhile, I've not looked into a book since late June!