Time for my reading challenge check-in. I haven’t been looking forward to this because, folks, it isn’t looking good. At the beginning of the year, I decided to challenge myself to read twenty-four books over the year.

My last check-in was pretty sad. As of April, I had only completed three books – The Wise Man’s Fear, A Single Man, The Gunslinger. I should have completed six then. Now it’s October. To date, I’ve finished seven, with six more in progress.

Completed

In Progress

That means I still need to complete seventeen books in three months. ARG! And I’ve been traveling Europe for the past two. But I shan’t give up. I can and I will reach my goal.

I’ve been traveling Europe for the past month, having settled in Romania a couple of weeks ago. I’ll be here until the middle of November, at which point I’ll be back home in Seattle. This trip to Romania is a chance for me to work face-to-face with my team out here. We do a great job at remain productive over many time zones. It’s been crunch time for awhile now, so I figured we would all benefit from working together, in person, in the same time zone, for a couple of months.

Anyway, back to my excuses…

That means I don’t have a lot of time to leisurely read while I’m here. And traveling with a suitcase of books didn’t seem like a good idea to me. So I opted for audiobooks instead. Sure, it’s not a reading challenge, but I still get to enjoy the stories I wanted to enjoy without 1.) taking up suitcase space; 2.) digging into work time. It’s been a great compromise.

The first story I listened to was The Shining. It look fifteen hours total, and I completed it in a couple of weeks — I tuned in during commutes, plane rides, right before going to bed, and sometimes while working on mundane tasks that took time but not a lot of brain power.

Right now, I’m listening Gardens of the Moon, a book I’ve already started reading back in Seattle. After that, I’ll stick to shorter books because that’s been my other problem. Fantasy and Science Fiction novels (my favorite) are usually pretty long. Since I’m trying to cram seventeen books in by the end of the year, I’ll have diversify a bit. I’ve been digging essays, like The Fran Lebowitz Reader and Samantha Irby’s We Are Never Meeting in Real Life ( <- serious lulz).

My other problem is I need to stop.picking.up.new.books. I start a new one before I finish the current one. Look at that In Progress list. Shit’s ridiculous!