Final Push – December (a blog)

So here we are at the start of December and I find my Goodreads goal to be lofty, but just, possibly, within reach. Reading 100 books in 2020 would be such an accomplishment if I can just get to the finish line.

December 3, 2020 – 82/100

Goodreads suggests I’m 10 books behind schedule… I suggest I’ve just been issued one heck of a December challenge. Luckily I’ve got some time off work this month, but I’ve still got lots of work to do, house cleaning to accomplish and Christmas to pull off… Good luck… I’m going to count down the last 20 books of my challenge. I’m going to have to read almost a book a day for most of the month to make it. So this may not be a pretty blog, because I’ve got to focus most of my time on reading.

Book #80 (20 to go) – Crashed – K. Bromberg

A cute end to a very “racy” series. Started out strong, and even though it got a little weak by the end of the series, it was plenty entertaining, a quick and easy read, and the companion series on Passionflix was problematic, but distracting. So distracting, however, that it did put a serious speed bump on my reading goals.

Book #81 (19 to go) – Clockwork Angel – Cassandra Clare

This was a re-read, but was a little difficult to get through in good time. I always love this series, but for some reason it did take a bit to get through. I think these are pretty substantial books to be taking on this late in the year and may have to shelve most of my Shadowhunter reading goals to 2021.

Book #82 (18 to go) – Ghost Story – Peter Straub (finished Dec 2)

This book was disappointing. It took me FOREVER to get through, having started well before Halloween. I did like how everything came together and very much enjoyed the very beginning and very end of the book, but there was a lot of middle ground to muddle through.

2020 Goals and TBR

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…