So I have to say that at the beginning of the year I didn't know if I'd make my reading goals with trying to keep the house together while selling and then trying to move. I thought maybe with the vacation I'd get lots of reading done with that and that would help. Yeah, not so much. Really, it was having to keep the house clean and then staying out of it that helped the most. It was easy to see the drop-off in the month we moved. 4 books finished that month. I know I had to rush the last few new authors at the end of December and used comics to get me to the 40 new author goal but trying the A-Z series challenge really did a number on trying to get new authors in since instead of just reading the first book in a new series, I would generally try to finish the series. By November, I'd given up on that and was just getting the first book in and moving on. It was a neat experiment tho as was the A-Z author and A-Z title challenges. I'm not doing them again this year because I want to focus on the one thing that I didn't do this year which was end the year with less books on my to-read pile than I start with . I failed miserably on that one this time around and the challenges were the biggest reason as I added a lot of books as a result of those.
So to recap, my goals for this year were 110 books, 40 new authors, and 35,000 pages read as well as the A-Z challenges previously mentioned. I surpassed my books and pages read and just barely met my new authors goal but meet it I did.
I always get a kick out of looking back at the books and new authors I read over the year. Again, there were some phenomenal new authors: Deborah Harkness, Anne Bishop, Lillith Saintcrow, Jennifer Estep, Roger Zelazny, Gail Carriger, Erin Morgenstern, Mercedes Lackey, Faith Hunter, Amy Sprenger, Faith Hunter, Steig Larsson, and Markus Zusak. There were a few books that really missed the mark with me this year, primarily some of the zombie books my oldest wanted me to read but there were another 20 or so that were just meh but that's ok. I read more books that I really enjoyed than ones I didn't so it's a good year.
So my goals for 2013 are 120 books, 40 new authors (this one always seems to be a stretch and comes down to the wire so not upping it), and 40,000 pages. Pretty tall order but since financially things are tight, this will hopefully mean less time out of the house doing stuff and more time in the house reading. A girl can dream anyway. Also again trying for the goal of reducing my to-read pile this year. At this time a year ago, according to Goodreads I had 1,171 books to read and Shelfari said 1,164 (again, not sure where the discrepency is from). Now I'm looking at 1,285 on Goodreads and 1,290 on Shelfari (this actually makes more sense since there are a few ebook freebies I've gotten that Goodreads doesn't have in it's database yet). As you can see, even with reading 129 books last year, I still piled more than 100 on my to-read list. Um, whoops. LOL So no weird challenges this year as I try to get that number down a bit. There will be a lot of books continuing to come in between freebies, latest in series I'm reading, book club reads (both Matthew's and the one I just joined), and gifts but hey, it's worth a shot.
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