Gooooooooooaaaaal!

Happy New Year, everyone!

I hope you all had amazing weekends, stayed safe, and had a grand time ushering in the New Year. As for me, I got to spend it with my family and best of friends, so I’d say it was a great time all around.

This month, I couldn’t think of a theme. In fact, I thought of a bunch of topics, but no grounding theme to set them together… and I figured that was good enough. So, for the month of January, we’re talking about topics too short to make a series out of. 

It’s hodge-podge month, here in Too Many Books to Count.

If you’ve joined my DivineReads Facebook group, then you already know that I don’t really like setting resolutions when we come to the New Year. Most of the time, we don’t meet them. We don’t succeed. They’re just a thing that we tell ourselves we’re going to do, at the beginning of the year, and by the middle of February we’ve decided it wasn’t worth it.

Well, last year I set myself a goal, instead.

I wanted to start reading again. And I figured twelve books was a reasonable number of books to start with. One a month. Not too hard. I’d still have time to get everything else done, too.

Here’s what I ended up reading:

1. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
2. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Tolkien)
3. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Tolkien)
4. Corridor: A Novella (Parrish)
5. The Last Wish (Sapkowski)
6. Sword of Destiny (Sapkowski)
7. Blood of Elves (Sapkowski)
8. The Time of Contempt (Sapkowski)
9. Ender in Exile (Card)
10. Speaker for the Dead (Card)
11. Xenocide (Card)
12. Children of the Mind (Card)
13. Murder on the Orient Express (Christie)
14. World War Z (Brooks)
15. Adam (Dekker)
16. White Plague (Abel)

(I actually only finished White Plague on Saturday, so just barely squeaked that one in)

In case you hadn’t noticed, that’s more than twelve books. Yeah, that’s sixteen. Only technically, since one of them was a novella, but still! That’s better than what I set out to do. That’s four more books than I thought I would have time to read, and fourteen more books than I made time for in 2016.

And I’m not planning on stopping there.

No, 2018 I’ve set a marginal goal of eighteen books. That’s six more than my goal for 2017. And yeah, I know it’s only two more than I read in 2017, but you know what? I have a lot more I have to do this year. I have more work duties this year than I had last year. But I think I can make time for eighteen books, and I hope I’m able to exceed that number.

So that’s my goal. And here’s some of what I’m hoping to read:

1. Artemis (Weir)
2. Master & Commander (O’Brian)
3. Baptism of Fire (Sapkowski)
4. Tower of Swallows (Sapkowski)
5. The Lady of the Lake (Sapkowski)
6. Death on the Nile (Christie)
7. Pirate Latitudes (Crichton)
8. The Wasp’s Nest (Norris)
9. Dragon Teeth (Crichton)
10. Beren and Luthien (Tolkien)

And that’s only ten. I have at least eight more slots to fill, so if you have any books you think I should check out, send me a link! And don’t forget to join Divine Reads if you want to keep in the loop about what I’m reading (more on that next time).

[love]

{Rani D.}