Last year, I joined one of the zillions of reading challenges in book blogging circles. The idea is you commit to reading a certain minimum number of books by the end of the year. I, quite ambitiously, committed to read 100 books by the end of 2010. You can see how well THAT went, here. (That page was formerly titled “The 100 Books Reading Challenge.” Not wanting to be constantly reminded of how miserably I failed to meet my goal, I changed it to “2010 Books Read” and at the same time created a new page for 2011 — wisely titling it “2011 Books Read.”)
I do, however, have a goal in mind, even if I’m not blasting it all over the bibliophilic blogosphere this time. My scaled-down goal for 2011 is to read 50 books by the end of the year. As of today, I have read four books, and it’s not even quite the end of January yet! Now, I figure if I can maintain this pace, plus have at least two months where I read five books in the month, I’ll reach my goal!
Here are the four books I’ve read so far this month, and this year (which for the next week are the same thing):
- Wanderer On My Native Shore: A Personal Guide & Tribute to the Ecology of the Atlantic Coast, by George Reiger
- Digging to America, by Anne Tyler
- Ayn Rand and the World She Made, by Anne C. Heller
- Anne Frank: the Book, the Life, the Afterlife, by Francine Prose
I literally just finished number four about an hour ago, so now I have the delicious task of figuring out what I am going to read next. (I have over 1,000 books in this one-bedroom apartment, and although many of them are books I’ve had for years, going back to when I was a kid, and from my teens and early adulthood, there are also a lot — probably hundreds — that I have not yet read.)
PAST CONTRIBUTOR.