2020: Happy New Year!

It has been forever since I posted. I hope to do better this year. In the spirit of New Year posts everywhere, I’ll start with my reading goals for 2020.

I’ve been steadily reading more and more every year since joining Litsy in 2016. I tried to do several of the more popular reading challenges in 2017 and 2018, but I found it to be too stressful. Last year, the only challenges I officially did were the Goodreads challenge and a MountTBR challenge, which are both purely based on total books read, with MountTBR limiting the reader to books owned prior to January 1st. That gave me the flexibility to read what I wanted (I’m a mood reader) while still giving me a goal to strive toward. This year, I decided that there are some books on my shelves that I really want to read, so I started to create my own personal challenge based around those desires. There are several chunksters I want to read, so I lowered the numerical goal for Goodreads and MountTBR, to allow me to read what I want without feeling too pressured by falling behind that arbitrary number.

My personal challenge involves (re)reading all of the Alexandre Dumas books I own: 6 novels that make up the D’Artagnan Romances and the unabridged version of The Count of Monte Cristo (I unknowingly read an abridged version 20+ years ago and I’m still mad that I didn’t realize it at the time). I’ve chosen themes for each month, except August – I haven’t decided what to do with August, maybe BOTM titles that I haven’t read or just a month to catch up and catch my breath. I created an Excel calendar for a short summary, with more options for each month in another tab: 2020 Personal Reading Challenge As for this blog, I probably won’t do lengthy reviews for everything I read, but I would like to do month-in-the-review posts with mini-reviews on everything I finish in a given month. To get a feel for it, I’m going to start retroactively, with posts for the books I read in 2019. Last year was a pretty good year for reading: