#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 10 Reading Challenge 2012

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.

#blog12daysxmas Day 6 Reading targets

There has been a bit of discussion during the week on Twitter about setting reading targets.  I have done that on Goodreads the last couple of years.  But I have been modest in my goals and both years I set it at 52 books, i.e. my aim was to read at least one book a week. I am gobsmacked at people who can set a target of 366 books, or a book a day.   Really my aim was to document my reading and prove to myself that I actually do still read stuff even if sometimes I have felt that I had lost the art of recreational reading amidst lots of other necessary reading.

The first year I documented my reading on Goodreads in 2010 I read 62 books (or 10 above my target) and last year 2011 I read 89 (or 37 above my target).  What will happen in 2012?  Well, despite the extra day provided by the leap year I won't be anywhere near the 89 of last year. My "read 2012" folder on Goodreads stands at 69 today BUT of these seven are books that I still have in my "currently reading" folder.  Am I really going to finish these seven books before midnight tomorrow?  I doubt it.  So stay tuned!  My total for 2012 will be at least 62, so similar to 2010. But who knows? Forbidden fruit is one of those on the list.  It's a reread but I count rereads!!

#blog12daysxmas Day 12 Reading 2011

Today is the day I finish my #blog12daysxmas blogging challenge and will take myself back to the beginning of the blog, Hecuba Reads. Two years ago around the same time of the year, I set up this blog in an attempt to recreate reading as a joy for me, or maybe as it turned out to document the reading I already did and the enjoyment it gave me. That year, 2010, I gave myself the aim of reading 52 books in the coming year. I also wanted to document them so that I had a record of my reading for pleasure. I have posted earlier in this blog about how I explored possibilities for this documentation and finally decided upon Goodreads as my favourite site to use. Goodreads records that in 2010 I read 61 books. So I met my target.

I have just been reviewing my achievements for 2011. That involved checking through the list of titles for 2011 and taking out the ones that are still also in my "to read" or "currently reading" shelves. So what did I end up with after that? Well, in 2011 I managed to read and record the reading of 87 titles.

These titles included a mixture of fiction and non-fiction but were predominantly fiction. There were in fact only seven non-fiction titles and they were a combination of cooking, travel and biography. Within fiction there were a lot of old favourites. I always do a bit of rereading of Agatha Christie and Georgette Heyer and some of their titles, of course, appear.


Three retrospective rereads purposely undertaken are also there for 2011. I had undertaken to reread the complete works of Elizabeth Peters in 2010 and some of these titles, mainly the one-offs, spilled over to 2011. I also reread all the Dorothy L. Sayers crime titles (and few Wimsey books that others have written since her death). When Kerry Greenwood's most recent title, Cooking the books came out, I read that and then went back and reread the whole Corinna series - and the whole Phryne series. Interestingly I discovered that there were a number of the Phrynes that I had not read before. I am not sure how I missed out on them, but obviously I had. Now I am just waiting for Kerry to write and publish a few more titles and, of course, eagerly awaiting the Phryne TV series on ABC-TV this year.


This year 2012 is the first year that I have actually given myself a target on the Goodreads site and I didn't want to be too ambitious. I have just gone for 52 again. Hopefully I can meet that target again. How much is it to ask to read one book a week in 2012? And I wonder what I will read? I am happy to let my reading occur serendipitously I think. I like picking up old favorites and reading them, or coming across new items on the Hawthorn Library new books shelves, or talking to people about things they have liked. Maybe I will get some ideas this year from the National Year of Reading too.


But I am just going to keep it simple. Reading isn't a chore that needs to be done or for which I want to set commitments. Reading is just something that I do every day (or most days) for fun and enjoyment and relaxation.

#blog12daysxmas Day 6 Goodreads

Well, here we are at day 6 of #blog12daysxmas so I am halfway through and not behind at this point - unlike last year when I was rushing in the rear until the last minute. One of the jobs I will be doing in the early new year so as part of this challenge will be to review how many books I have read in 2011 and what they were.

A couple of years ago at this time of the year I set up this blog to try to encourage myself to read more - or maybe to document what I read as it turned out. I soon got sick of writing reviews on here of every book I read, though I do it occasionally. So I then looked at a range of online tools for documenting what I was reading. After trying out a few I finally decided on Goodreads and find it great and easy to use. It has a very comprehensive database where I have rarely been unable to find a book I wanted to add to My Books. And when this happened once I easily added the title. I can keep my books on a range of shelves and so I can easily see how many books I read in 2011 - or have read to date in 2011 as I have a few I need to finish off.

As it is a social network as well as a database I can read other people's reviews and ratings and get regular bulletins about what my friends are reading or want to read. When I was doing Frontline late this year, I found the reviews on Goodreads great for the task that used online reviews so bear that in mind if you are about to do or are doing Frontline.

There are book discussions and groups that I don't participate in much and recommendations as well, based either on genre or on books on your shelves. I could do a lot more with Goodreads but at present I am happy that it is a good way for me to document my reading, read ratings and reviews and get updates on what my friends are reading. You can set it up to automatically document your reading progress on Twitter and Facebook and embed widgets in your blogs and websites as I have done on this blog.

Do you Goodread? If you do, you can find Polyxena there.

#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.

Book 1: A murder is announced

After all this phaffing around playing with BookJetty and then with Goodreads which has some things going for it over BookJetty but still has the same lack of Australian content, I think it is probably about time that I wrote about reading a book! I am not really sure of the order in which I read the first few books and may well have been reading them simultaneously while watching television with my mother over my January mother-sitting.

Anyway the first book that I am going to mention is one by that old favourite of mine, Agatha Christie. It's A murder is announced and the copy I read wasn't the one pictured above but an old Pan paperback that I recently got given when a friend was clearing out a house after a relative's death. Like all Agatha Christie A murder is announced has been published and printed and reprinted in many, many formats and languages.

I was glad to have it as I don't think I own it (?) and it was nice to read at a stressful time. Despite not having read it for years I remembered the solution in the first chapter and enjoyed myself immensely picking out the clues that Agatha had placed in the text throughout. It is probably quite appropriate that an Agatha Christie is my first book for 2010. I have been reading and rereading her since I was a teenager and cannot even start to count the number of hours of pleasure I have gained from her books (and the films of the books).