Do Annual Reading Plans Ever Make It Through a Whole Year?

I don't know what it is about starting a new year, but I always seem to bite off more than I can chew when it comes to stacking up books for later reading.  Maybe it's all those "Best Of" and "Watch For" lists that show up everywhere in December and January that cause it.  Whatever it is, it's happening again.

I read thirteen books in January and I'm deep into four others at the moment, so you would think that I'd be scurrying around in search of a book or two for February right now.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  Instead, I have a formal TBR list of twelve books, new ones and old ones, some of which I had never even heard of just a few days ago:

• The Crossing - Michael Connelly
• A Banquet of Consequences - Elizabeth George
• The Year of the Flood -Margaret Atwood
• Evil Eye - Joyce Carol Oates
• Ripper - Isabel Allende
• A Darker Domain - Val McDermid
• The Bazaar of Bad Dreams - Stephen King
• The Bridge - Robert Knott
• The Black Box  - Michael Connelly
• Lit Up - David Denby
• There Will Be Stars - Billy Coffey
• The Skeleton Road - Val McDermid

I look forward to reading every single one of the books on the list, but the list is still not right...only one nonfiction book in the lot, and that's my review copy of Lit Up.  So what's the solution?  You guessed it: time to go on a search for five or six more nonfiction titles to add to all this fiction. 

Throw in the "dedicated author" reading I plan to do every year - last year, for instance, I read six of Steinbeck's novels - and that further complicates the "problem."  This year my dedicated author is Philip Roth and I'm currently reading The Ghost Writer, the first of Roth's four Zuckerman novels.  I know that my reading pace will slow way down as soon as the weather changes for the better (and baseball season begins) so I wonder sometimes why I get so excited every January...just another book nerd problem, I suppose.

Heck, maybe this is all just my unconscious version of a New Year's resolution.

EDIT:  Can't believe I forgot to mention the 10 books I have on hold at my library branch right now.  With my luck, all ten will suddenly show up during the same week or two.