Here’s my final 2017 Reading Challenge check-in! This time last year, I have myself a goal to read 24 books by the end of the year.

Let’s get straight to it. I didn’t make it. I was just four books shy! (I unsuccessfully tried to argue that The Once and Future King should be counted as four books, but no one was buying it.)

I was certainly upset with myself for not completing my challenge, but also I got to read a lot of really great books in 2017 (and a couple I just didn’t care for). Here’s what made the cut.

Completed

  1. The Wise Man’s Fear
  2. A Single Man
  3. The Gunslinger
  4. The Drawing of Three
  5. The Wastelands
  6. We Are Never Meeting in Real Life
  7. The Shining (💯 spooky af)
  8. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
  9. Light Falls: Space, Time and an Obession of Einstein
  10. 1984 (an especially important read in today’s climate)
  11. Dark Lure (meh)
  12. Cocaine Blues: Phryne Fisher #1 (I ❤️ this show)
  13. American Gods (I ❤️ this show too!)
  14. God is Dead
  15. Coraline (a fun fast read)
  16. PS from Paris (mehhhhh)
  17. Now I Know
  18. Capture Your Style
  19. The Fran Lebowitz Reader
  20. Kitchen Confidential (I got to meet him this year too!)
  21. Slaughterhouse Five

In Progress

Lesson learned: Big, year-long resolutions don’t work well for me. Instead of keeping to a timely schedule, I punted my list until the end of the year. The result is I ended up rushing through books or choosing books I knew I likely wouldn’t have read otherwise, but did because of their sweet (short) word count. On that note, I also learned that I’m definitely a sci-fi and fantasy fan. Thrillers are okaayy – they tend to be predictable. I do enjoy horror though – but given that horror is usually a subgenre of fantasy, that puts me within the scope of the genres I like to read.

I also learned to choose pages over books. For most of the year, the books I gravitated to tended to boast big page numbers. That hurt my goal in the end because I was trying to close books, not pages. As you can see, I ended up with unfinished novels that I put down in order to meet my goal. So for 2018, it’s page count all the way baby! And even to that, I don’t have a goal to read N pages by the end of the year. Instead, my goal is to just simply read at least 25 pages of any book every day. We’ll see where I land this time next year.