#blog12daysxmas Day 10 Nine coaches waiting

On the tenth day of Christmas I hunkered down at home in the second day of near 40 heat and read: my second title for 2015. Not surprisingly I continued on my binge and it was another Mary Stewart.

Reviews I read referred to this title, Nine Coaches Waiting, as a mix of Jane Eyre and Rebecca meets Georgette Heyer. How could that mixture lose? It certainly held me enthralled through a ghastly Melbourne summer's day.

Where will my binge lead me next?

#blog12daysxmas Day 9 Goodreads 2015

Serendipitously, not long today after I had posted yesterday's post in which I speculated about what reading targets I would set for 2015, almost on cue I got an email from Goodreads suggesting I might like to set a 2015 target!  So I jumped onto their site and now I am locked into 52 titles for 2015.

And this evening I completed my first title, Mary Stewart's Gabriel Hounds, which I started reading as part of my post Christmas Mary Stewart binge. It was certainly just the thing for hunkering down in our near 40c temperature today. It's still in the 30s and not getting down to the low, 28c, until the morning. So I can predict more Mary Stewart reading overnight.

Which will I choose?

#blog12daysxmas Day 8 Goodreads 2014

As it's New Year's Day, it is time to start tallying up how I went in the challenges I set myself in early 2014. For reading i.e. Goodreads I set myself the modest challenge of reading or re-reading 52 titles in 2014, as I have done since I first started using Goodreads. 

You can see from the screen dump that I easily met this challenge and my reading totalled 104 titles in 2014. That's quite an increase over the 76 I totalled in 2013. So I am pleased with that.

How did you go in your reading challenges? Were they too high or too low? Despite my regularly exceeding my target in recent years, I shall probably still keep it at 52 for 2015. I think a title a week is a fine target and reading needs to be a pleasure not a chore. 

#blog12daysxmas Day 7 Mary Stewart

As I predicted earlier in the week I was certainly starting a Mary Stewart binge. That's what Christmas is really about: long, hot days indulging in reading. I moved on to her third Greek one, This rough magic set in Corfu. I enjoyed the suspense and the Greek flavour of it. I marvel at how she can keep the feeling of suspense up even though the reader knows that there will be a cosy ending. But she is a mistress of this. 

After finishing that I was at a loss but a look at a list of Stewart's books in chronological order sent me back to her first, Thunder on the right. If I had read it before, I had no memory of the plot or the book generally and probably won't be going back to it soon. A good first effort that shows promise? A young former colleague of mine was discouraged by being told something similar on NYE about her first attempt at a novel but maybe she should take heart about my comments here about Mary Stewart in the context of Stewart's long writing career. Every writer has to start somewhere.