I lowered my reading goal this year to 30 books for my Goodreads Challenge, down from my usual goal of 40-45 books. Last year I read 42 books, in 2022 I read 60 books and 2021 and 2020 are a bit skewed because I was counting a lot of the books I was reading Forest at that time so those years come in at 110 and 188—and it looks like 2019 is skewed at 139, too. I mean, I did read them! Most of them might have been 20 pages long, though! hah! The reason for lowering my goal this year was because I wanted to focus on some longer…

In 2023 I set the goal to read 40 books in my Goodreads challenge. I hit 42 and spent December thinking I would read two more but just never did. And that’s fine. I lowered my goal to 30 this year because I want to read a giant stack of magazines I have piled up in addition to some thicker books I’ve been putting off for a while. Audiobooks will still fill in many gaps and I suspect I’ll surpass 30 books easily but I prefer to ease up on myself on this end a bit. I looked over the books I read in 2023 on Goodreads and realized it…

Alright, time for January’s book roundup! I read 8 books this month! I’ll break down which is audio, kindle, and paper. Audiobooks did a lot of heavy lifting as per usual and I think you want to add in more reading to your life, an audiobook is the way to go. 1: Playing God in the Meadow by Martha Leb Molnar – Kindle I enjoyed this book but was frustrated with the author at several points along the way. The author and her husband have bought a property in Vermont and in front of their house is a huge former apple orchard that has fallen into disrepair due to disease.…

As per usual, I hit a reading slump around May which lasted through most of June. I didn’t finish a book for about six weeks but I am slowly climbing out of that hole. I will likely have another slump, based on years of noticing my pattern, sometime later this summer. Which is why I do a lot of reading at the beginning to the year to counterbalance it all. I’m currently at 35/45 for my Goodreads challenge and I suspect I will end up around the 60 book mark again this year when all is said and done. Audiobooks are still carrying a heavy weight in the count but…

A few years ago I regularly did Monthly Book Reports but that fell by the wayside. It’s hard to believe it has been so long but I think I’m going to bring them back in the form of quarterly updates with my favorites from the previous three months. For the first quarter of the year I’ve read 19 books. Some were great, others I muddled through, and I abandoned one or two. It has been good to see so many people talk about abandoning books that you can’t get into because I was a former “finisher” and it is something I still cling to and am working on. Sure, it…

Last year I read 60+ books (not counting the ones I read with Forest) and I keep tabs of it over on Goodreads. Feel free to friend me over there if you’d like! By far the heavy lifting of my reading last year was audiobooks and I have significantly replaced podcast listening with audiobooks over the last two years. If you keep your audiobooks to 10 hours and under and listen at 1.5-2x speeds then you can easily read an audiobook every few days or so. I listen while I work most often but I have tasks that don’t allow me to focus on two things at once so I…