#blog12daysxmas Day 7 What have I achieved?

I started this blog Hecuba Reads on 7 January 2010 because of a resolution which may have been a New Year's one. It certainly came to me in January. It related to my concern that I wasn't reading as much I as I had in the past, well not reading books, and really feeling that my book knowledge was not very good any more. I knew I always still had books on the go but they were not documented - unlike those voraciously consumed by @ladymidnight.


So I set myself the aim of reading 52 books in 2010 - and also of documenting them. So how did I go? Well, the first challenge was to decide how and where to document them. I set up this blog and initially I was using it to write a post about each book as I finished it. I also played around with Evernote, and Bookjetty and Goodreads amongst other sites trying to find something that worked for me and wasn't intrusive to my life.


You can read about my explorations in earlier posts. I fairly soon decided that Goodreads worked for me. I could access it on my PC, my VDI and via an Itouch app. I could link it to Facebook and Twitter and I could easier track my progress through each book. I could add titles which were not already on the database and I could write reviews. I did write reviews initially by setting up links to my posts on this blog. But eventually that fell away as my life became too complicated in 2010 and doing blogposts about comfortable old reads lapsed in importance.


So I managed to document my reading. According to Goodreads I read 63 books in 2010 so I met and indeed exceeded my challenge of reading at least 52 books. You can see what the 63 were on Goodreads. What did I read? Well, the answer is much as I thought. I read a lot of fiction, mainly crime, some of it new but lots of it old favourites. I embarked for example on reading the complete works of Elizabeth Peters (under that name only). I had read a lot of them before but not all and I really enjoyed reading both the favourites and a couple of recent publications. I read a bit of non-fiction - travel, biography, cooking and history. So nothing was very unpredictable.


I am glad that I started documenting my reading and I'll continue doing it in 2011. Goodreads is a good tool for that. So Day 7 of this blogging is being done on day 8, but it relates to my achievements by day 7. Hopefully I'll be able to catch up by doing two some time over the weekend.