2020 Goals and TBR

Posted on by Heather's Book Nook

Okay, call me a cheater…

Is it fair to write your 2020 goals and tbr post more than halfway through January??? Sure it is… Maybe not a January goals and tbr but there’s no extra points for posting early and at least I’m past the post-new-years-resolution phase of the year.

A Little of my Reading History

I was a cute, young, avid reader… I remember reading the Little House on the Prarie Series in grades 1 and 2, jumping into the Anne of Green Gables Series and buying / reading such literary gems as Sweet Valley High and The Baby-Sitters Club through my middle grade years… I read, I wrote, I loved EVERYTHING literary… Through high school I read a lot of Stephen King and through university I took english and classics classes just to continue on my literary journey while pursuing an engineering degree…

Needless to say, I loved reading… But once I got into a career and motherhood, it was all downhill from there… I can probably count on my fingers (both hands though) the number of books I read in 2018.

Mid-2019, I was perusing youtube looking for new and interesting romance tv-series excerpts I was addicted to watching and I came across a video referring to “booktube”. Now I’m not OLD, but I’m old enough that I wasn’t sure if that was part of youtube or a separate app.

Well I figured that out and watching that lead me to downloading goodreads and I set a challenge to read 1 book per month (which I thought was a lot)… Reading 1 book lead to reading 2, lead to reading quite a few, ending 2019 with a total of 32 books read.

The moral of this very long, unfocused rant, is that I don’t have a ton of context by which to set my 2020 and beyond reading goals.

Finally, get on with the 2020 goals already

I’ve watched a lot of youtube videos and read a lot of blogs about people’s various 2020 reading goals. As much as I like some of the laudable goals of reading more of certain genres, authors, new reads, clearing tbrs, etc., I accept that I don’t really know enough of my own reading style to clearly set such challenges… So for me this year, it really all comes down to the numbers. On January 1 I set my goodread goals at 52 (1 book / week – I know, I’m not all that original)… By the first week, I was 4 books in and knew that I could do WAY better than that… So I changed it to 78 (1.5 books / week)… Now 3 weeks in and I think I can… I think I can… I think I can:

100 Books

Yes, you read it right… I said it… I’m trying to go from less than 10 to 100 books per year in less than 2 years… It will take a lot of commitment, but there are SO MANY BOOKS I want to read, I would be cheating myself if I didn’t try… And I’m certainly not someone who wants to set a goal that is easy / almost certain to be achieved.

So that’s it… there are lots of books that I’m interested in reading. I want to complete Cassandra Clare’s “The Dark Artifices” series, I want to get into “The Diviners” and lots of other books that I have gleaned from all my youtube / blogging watching. By next year I should know enough about what I want to read to be able to established more varied and colourful goals.

Thanks for reading this unending rant… best wishes to everyone for a successful, book-filled 2020… I’d love any reading suggestions for either 2020 released or older books, as I have a lot of years to make up for…

A Monster Calls… Be ready for tears

Posted on by Heather's Book Nook

Just finished “A Monster Calls” by Patrick Ness. Oh my goodness my heart may never beat the same. I rate it 5 Stars and 1,000,000 tears. Having given this book 5 stars out of 5, makes me re-think my complete rating system because there are not many books that can even come close to holding a candle to how much I was affected by this book.

A Monster Calls is an incredibly poignant story about a young boy who’s mother is ill and how this illness affects all aspects of his life. He is haunted by nightmares / not nightmares of a monster who visits him at the same time each night.

Although the basic plot of this book is pretty straightforward and it is by no means a mystery, the trip to get there is a tangled web of reality, fantasy and delusion. The characters and atmosphere drag you in and won’t let you go.

Fair warning, this story is disturbing… If anyone is thinking that this is a story that might help someone going through a rough time with either their own health or the health of a loved one, I DO NOT recommend this read. I fully admit that I don’t know anything about grief or grief counselling, but I was affected enough being in a very balanced and good point in my life and consider it akin to reading “The Rainbow Bridge” when you have an aging, beloved pet.

It is a dark, dark story (in case you couldn’t tell by the colour scheme of this review), but is beautifully written and full of meaningful messages, such as the one above, in that there’s no harm done in thinking terrible, negative things, as long as you don’t act on them.

After that, it’s time to pull out a light, comedy or romance book to cleanse my palette… thanks for reading!