My reading goals for 2015:
- 104 books - Jan: 23 Feb: 6 Mar: 16 Apr: 12 May: 25 Jun: 15 Jul: 34 Aug: 12 Sep: 14 Oct: 28 Nov: 25 Dec: 14
- The Three Musketeers finished with 4 days to spare
- 12 books from my physical TBR shelf - Jan: 3 May: 1 Nov: 3 Dec: 1 year-end: incomplete
- Catch up on a series Completed Nov
- Read 12 challenging books - Jan: 2 Feb: 1 May: 2 Jun: 1 Jul: 2 Aug: 3 Sep: 1 Oct: 2 Nov: 3 Dec: 1
- Read 6 anthologies or collections May: 1 Jul: 1 Sep: 1 Oct: 2 Nov: 3 Dec: 5
- Read or evaluate 24 electronic freebies - Jan: 5 Mar: 1 May: 6 Sep: several Oct: 2 Dec: 1
I'd like to read a couple of books a week, maybe 25K pages? This will be a drop from the last couple of years and will probably happen on its own.
Spoiler:
January: read 23 "books" including a few shorter works, ~5600 pages. I expect the pace to drop off from here for external reasons.
February: 6 books, ~1500 pages.
March: 9 books, 2 graphic novels, 5 shorter works, 1 re-read, ~3900 pages. Notable: Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor.
April: 10 books, 2 shorter works, 2 re-reads, ~3200 pages.
May: 10 books, 5 shorter works, 10 comic book issues, 6 re-reads ~4300 pages.
June: 12 books, 1 shorter work, 1 graphic novel, 1 comic book issue, 1 re-read ~4600 pages. Notable: Sarah Monette's Somewhere Beneath Those Waves and The Bone Key; Scott Hawkins' The Library at Mount Char.
July: 5 novels, 2 collections, 2 non-fiction, 27 shorter works, ~5300 pages (26360 ttl). Notable: Jordan Ellenberg's How Not to Be Wrong. Many short works this month, mostly binging on Hambly stories from Scribd, also the very few readable bits from the Hugo packet.
August: 9 novels, 1 non-fiction, 2 shorter works, ~6700 pages (31100 ttl). Notable: Can You Forgive Her? is my favorite Trollope so far.
September: 10 novels, 2 magazines, 2 shorter works, ~3500 pages (34610 ttl). Notable: Greatly enjoyed David D. Levine's Damage, a short story published at tor.com.
October: 7 novels, 9 magazines, 6 shorter works, 1 graphic novel, 1 anthology, 4 re-reads. Notable: Noelle Stevenson's graphic novel/webcomic Nimona.
November: 13 novels, 6 magazines, 4 shorter works, 1 anthology, 1 non-fiction. Notable: Ann Leckie's Ancillary Mercy, N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season, K.J. Charles' Think of England.
December: 4 novels, 3 magazines, 3 shorter works, 3 anthologies/collections. Year-end: 222 works first read in 2015, 49K pages. Ended up being a drop from 2014 but about on a par with 2013 and 2012.
My bucket book for the year is The Three Musketeers. I've read The Count of Monte Cristo at least a dozen times, while a paper copy of TTM is my most traveled book ever (many airplane flights) and yet I've never made significant progress. A couple of the books I read last year referenced TTM and I'd like to finally read it.
Procured and started the Pevear translation at the end of November. About 20% in. Not sure if I prefer the translation that much or if I just got traction, but here's hoping.
Finished just before year-end! d'Artagnan is not much of a hero in my book, but Athos and Milady were both great. Milady rather escaped authorial control, methinks.
I want to reduce the immobility of my physical TBR shelf. I keep picking up the next thing that looks interesting on the ereader. I want to read or evaluate 12 of the books on the physical shelf.
I want to either catch up on Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January mysteries or finally read the last three books in her dragon quartet. They've been on that TBR shelf far too long.
October: re-read Dragonsbane and made a cautious beginning on Dragonshadow.
November: read the remaining volumes.
I want to read more books that ask more of me. I was disappointed by how little of my last year's reading took sustained effort.
Spoiler:
January: read Rene Denfeld's The Enchanted and Christian Rudder's Dataclysm.
February: Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem. SF with footnotes takes more work than the 27th in a random series, so it counts.
May: Delany's Babel-17. Whole lot of ideas get rushed at the end. Butler's Bloodchild and Other Stories, well worth slowing down and thinking about the concepts in the SF stories.
June: Alfred Lubrano's Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams. Written by a "Straddler" about the experiences and attitudes of first-generation white-collar workers.
July: Jordan Ellenberg's How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking, the best work in this general science realm I've read in several years. Charles Ellis et al.'s Falling Short: The Coming Economic Crisis and What to Do About It didn't tell me much new, in the end, probably useful for someone who doesn't read the personal finance mags.
August: an ambitious month. Finished Trollope's He Knew He Was Right and galloped right through Can You Forgive Her? Also, Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee's Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things.
September: am counting Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora, having read most of it one long chapter at a time rather than giving up. Interesting even if the biological/chemical perils of Pauline were overblown.
October: am likewise counting Ian Tregillis' The Mechanical and C.A. Higgins' Lightless. The Tregillis has a wonderful Dutch vs. French alternate history, but the centrality of enslavement is hard for me to read. The Higgins was just plain hard for me to engage with but I ended up enjoying it.
November: am counting the three Hambly books as the demonic possession was hard for me to read, thus the long time on the TBR shelf.
December: had some trouble getting traction on The Three Musketeers once again, but mission accomplished.
I'd like to read several of the anthologies that accumulate even more rapidly in proportion than novels.
I want to go through more of my accumulated freebies in an organized fashion, and either read or evaluate them. If I find worthwhile books, I want to let people know about them.
Additional notes:
Went to the effort of coming up with Hugo nominees in March. Not that it matters. Thanks, Sad Puppies.
Coming up with more Hugo nominees for next year. Not that it will matter.
Memo to self: copy to buffer before posting in case the "not logged in" quirk bites me.