The Writer Reads: 22 Books in 2015

I started off January of 2015 fresh-faced and brimming full of optimistic hope at the prospect of the shiny, beautiful new goal I had set for myself: reading 36 books in 12 months.  3 books per month.  Piece of cake!

By the end of February, I was fully aware of how ridiculous my goal was for me.  Voracity does not necessarily equate speed.  Loving to read and wanting to read and reading in all of one's free time does not make one a fast reader.  I study the text, reread passages, and am overall a fairly slow reader.  The year's activities also came into play, filling up my calendar and sucking away my free time.  Books particularly tend to fall by the wayside when one is trying to write one's own novel.  I read whenever I could, but it just wasn't enough to allow for three books a month.

I amended my goal to 30 books in a year... and then 24... and finally, 20.  Each time I lowered the number meant pain and shame, but that's what happens when reality sets in and you have to be honest with yourself.  It was either fail or be open to change (both terrible choices for me).  20 turned out to be the most realistic number.  My mom advised me that instead of tweaking my goal, I should consider selecting shorter books to read-- advice I tried to heed towards the end.

I also had some specifications for my books: I wanted to read an equal amount of nonfiction, classics, and "other" books ("other" meaning young adult or just for fun).  This portion of the goal was meant to help me diversify my taste in literature and authors.  Now this, I did accomplish: 7 nonfiction, 7 classics, and 8 young adult/just for fun.  22 in total.

If I were smart about it, I would have written a short review AFTER reading each book, but alas, my foresight was limited.  There's no way I would be able to write a worthy review for each book now, so far after the fact, so without further ado, here, simply, is my list:

22 books: Nonfiction, YA or for fun, and a classic.

1.     Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain
2.     The Impossible Knife of Memory by Laurie Halse Anderson
3.     This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
4.     Choose Your Own Autobiography by Neil Patrick Harris
5.     Stardust by Neil Gaiman
6.     Story of a Soul by St. Thérèse Martin
7.     Dark Places by Gillian Flynn
8.     Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
9.     The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
10. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
11. Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened by Allie Brosh
12. A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
13. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
14. The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
15. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
16. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
17. The Stranger by Albert Camus
18. The Indigo Children: The New Kids Have Arrived by Lee Carroll & Jan Tober
19. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards
20. Binge by Tyler Oakley
21. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
22. William Shakespeare’s Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope by Ian Doescher

Of those, I would have to say my top three favorites were Lolita; This Side of Paradise; and The Stranger.  My least favorite were The Night Circus; The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; and The Indigo Children.  (As a note, I only read that last book as diligent but agonizing research for my NaNoWriMo project, "Indigo."  See a theme?)

I'm not setting a reading goal for 2016, nor will I even hold out hope for reading more than this year.  No more forcing myself to churn through book after book or picking a book over one I really want to read simply for the sake of the genre.  I'm happy to go back to reading for the joy of reading.  After all, writers read, and readers write.  May you all have a blessed and happy new year, full of the power of words, the peace of quiet, the excitement of adventure, and the knowledge of self.