04 January 2011

Bye, bye 2010! Recapping the reading

2010 was a crazy year what with the stress of trying nearly the whole year to sell my house.  In my attempt to "declutter" and "stage" my house for potential buyers I wound up packing up books that I was intending to read!  More stress!

According to Goodreads stats (far more accurate than my count-your-reading-journal-pages method), I read 91 books this year , 9 more than last year, but I only read 28,809 pages compared with 29,709 pages last year.  This probably reflects my attempts to infuse a little young adult into my reading repertoire.  I had intended to try and break the 100 book barrier but the craziness of December put the kibosh on that.  If I had to choose my favorite book from the year it would be a tie between Jasper Fforde's Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron (an author I have an obvious favorable bias towards) and Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak; I read both at the beginning of the year and they are still with me.  Least favorite book was Vixen; it wasn't so bad I wanted to light it on fire, but it really got under my skin with the cliches and seemingly poor research.

I participated in a few challenges this year.  The Women Unbound Challenge was the one I completed, even reading one book beyond what I'd planned.  Sadly, I didn't get the Complete Booker Challenge 2010 finished; I got three of six Booker-winning novels read but just never got to the other three (I did read one Booker short-list, so not a complete bust).  I'm going to have to think on the future of challenges in 2011.

My Nostalgia Project stalled out with its initial subject - Flowers in the Attic.  Too intense.  The Booker Project and Newbery Project are coming along swimmingly, the Newbery especially, but the Best American Project had to go on hold when I had to pack all my Best American books in order to how the house.  I didn't make much reading progress on the Nobel Project but I did acquire more books to help me in the endeavor (and I can't quite decide with Vargas Llosa to read...too many good choices there).

In honor of the International Year of Chemistry in 2011, I started a blog specifically for reading chemistry-related books (readingchemistry.blogspot.com).  I cross-posted a few science/chemistry posts from this blog and will probably continue to cross-post in the future.

This year I also made my first foray into requesting review copies...which added a whole new level of stress because now I feel obligated to read and finish the book I've requested.  Thank goodness I didn't go nuts and ask for many more review copies - packing and moving has gotten me far, far behind on the ones I have right now!

That's it for 2010 - bye, bye and so long!

No comments:

Post a Comment