Last year, I decided to finally try the Goodreads Challenge. Frankly, I was less concerned about my ability to read 52 books in 2018 than I was about my ability to actually keep track of them. That may seem a little odd, but I've always been a pretty avid reader and the truth is that I have a hard time remembering to do anything faithfully, including eating and sleeping. It's just one of the frightfully quirky things that makes me, me--like the time I forgot to pay my phone bill and instead paid my utility bill twice. You know, the stuff that keeps life exciting.
By "exciting," I mean one of those county fair teacup rides that spins you till you're dizzy and about to barf. Some people might think excitement is supposed to be like lovey butterflies in your stomach which make you feel like you're floating, but the other truth is that love hits my stomach like a lead balloon, too. Love, the flu, poTAYto, poTAHto.
That might be a little too much truth for so early in a blog. So, anyway, uh, back to reading.
I actually managed to keep track of all or most of the books I read, and I discovered that I'd also underestimated how much reading I did, because I ended the year with a whopping 108 books on my list. They weren't all gems. A few were actual clunkers. A few were respectable but overregarded tomes (I'm looking at you, The Alienist), a few were actually rereads (Tom Sawyer, A Christmas Carol, Emma), and a few were books I only read because they were lying around handy. For some inexplicable reason, I spent a couple months reading the first 10 novels of the Agatha Raisin cozy mystery series...and wondering the entire time why I wasn't reading something better. I suppose there was something comfortingly familiar about them.
Of course there were some very good books, too, including: The Feather Thief, The Song of Achilles, Rules of Civility, Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice series; the true crime masterpiece, I'll Be Gone in the Dark; the sublime H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald, and two books by the hilarious Jennifer Wright (It Ended Badly and Get Well Soon).
This year, I thought I'd try blogging about what I read. Not everything I read (I've set a goal for 100 books and I'm already well into books 4 and 5). Maybe one book a week, maybe just what strikes my fancy. My reading habits are broad and unpredictable, not organized. I read whatever interests me at the time. I figure my blogging will be like that. I won't strictly write reviews; if that's what I had in mind, I'd just post them on Goodreads. This will be whatever I feel like writing about--with books!
Think of it as the Chex Mix of blogs. Everybody knows you're here for the books, but in the meantime there's a lot of Corn Chex to eat your way through.
