As in 2010 and in 2011, in 2012 I set myself the challenge of reading 52 books. This challenge was set in Goodreads and monitored in their Challenge section and in my read-2012 shelf. This was the cause of some confusion for a while as there were discrepancies. It took me a while to realize that the reason for that was my rereads. If I reread a title and marked it as read in the Goodreads app, it didn't go down as part of my challenge reading as the original reading date stood. I realized that I could go into the website and manually change it but that was too much like work. Ultimately I decided to go with the items in my read-2012 shelf (once I had moved a few unfinished ones to the new read-2013 shelf).
The other bit that was decidedly like work and one of the causes for delay in posting this account was that at the end of 2012 I had outstanding three read books which were not on Goodreads and which I had to catalogue manually, download an image etc. I finally did that this morning. So....
DRUMROLL!
I certainly met my 2012 challenge of reading 52 books. I documented on Goodreads a total of 70 books as having been read in 2012. Of these 18 were non-fiction: cooking, travel, biography and history. And the remaining 62, not surprisingly were fiction, predominantly crime fiction and crime fiction written by women. During the year as in other years I reread books, this year focusing on Ngaio Marsh (though I didn't read her complete oeuvre), and, triggered by the Miss Phryne Fisher TV series, on Kerry Greenwood whose Phryne series and Corinna series I reread. The others were new or recent publications such as those by Carolyn Morwood and Sulari Gentill.
So I am happy with this. I am amazed at people who can read 366 books but I don't want to emulate that. I read for enjoyment and, if it starts being a race, I will stop enjoying it. I predominantly use Goodreads to document my reading through the year and know that there are times such as when blobbing through heatwaves or when I am laid low in my sickbed that I binge-read and also that there are other times when I am so busy with other stuff that little book reading gets done. So be it.
So 2013 is ahead of me and I have again set myself the challenge of 52 books for the year. I am already up to 5 books on the 9 January 2013 and it will be 6 shortly. January heatwave binge mode is the reason and no doubt the numbers will drop off after the weather changes.
