Quests and Mini-Missions

As the saying goes, "I was born with a reading list I will never finish."

Being a geek/nerd/fangirl, this gets extended to movies, television, graphic novels and of course, more books. The only way to get through them it to have a plan. Plans are boring so I make them quests and mini-missions. It is fun and can be completely customized by you as to which ones you want to do. However, part of all good quests involve some risk so even if you hit a book or a movie you don't want to watch or read, you have to suffer through.

The first quest I ventured on and have since conquered was to watch all the movies on the AFI list of Top 100 Movies of all Time. It took a few years to do, but totally worth it. I ended up watching and loving a lot of movies, I wouldn't have seen otherwise. My favorites that I discovered were The Third Man, Network, The African Queen, The Philadelphia Story, 12 Angry Men and The Apartment. The only bad movie on the list (that I have no clue why this movie was on there) was A Place in the Sun.

The second quest, which is ongoing and much slower, is to read all the BBC Must Read Books. There is a lot of controversy about the list, but I thought it was a good jumping off point. I have posted a few updates on this and will continue to do so. When I started, I had only read 17 of the 100 and now I am almost up to 50. I have been liking most of them, but every now and then I hit one that just endlessly drags and has been a pain to read. I'm looking at you, Wuthering Heights. Why can you be more like your sister, Jane Eyre?

These are more epic quests that long and have peaks and valleys, but in the end are totally worth it. Then there are mini-missions. These are more like short jogs with less grand end results and are more for a general sense of accomplishment.

One mini-mission was one to read all of Chuck Palahniuk's books and stay up to date. I just recently posted how I finally got caught up on that one.

Another mini-mission is one I do at the beginning of every year. I make a blog post for books I read, movies I watch and television I watch for the new year. I make the categories up and add to it as I finish reading or watching them. For the movies, I start with a list of all the movies that I hear about or see trailers for that are supposed to be coming on that year. I realized recently that for 2011 and 2012 I still had movies on the list of wanting to see, but hadn't yet so I made made that a mini-mission to knock those out.

The point of all this is to explain what and why I do so you can do quests and mini-missions as well!