Current Reading Status

At the beginning of the year, I set a reading goal of 50 books. This seems like a low bar considering how many I read last year (65). When setting the goal for this year, I realized that I wanted to focus on diversifying my efforts a bit, to pursue some of my other interests with more gusto.

To that end, I managed to finish the first revision of my NaNoWriMo book earlier this month, and I'd like to keep writing more consistently (look for a future blog entry on my experimentation with fountain pens). I've started running again, and have kept up the habit fairly well so far. I also have a goal of necessity: I want to become more flexible. My muscles and joints tend to ache more now than they used to, and I think that increasing my flexibility (or at least focusing on stretching/warming down properly) will help mitigate that.

The good news is that I'm making progress along all of the above fronts, and am enjoying doing them as well. But reading... Reading might have been a catalyst to help me figure out that I needed to spend a little more time doing things that expand my mind and make me happy, especially in light of so much that might cause distress day-to-day. (insert politics/economics/other miscellaneous worries here)

It's the last day of February, and I have managed to finish reading eight books so far this year. They are:

1. The Backwards Mask, by Matt Carson
2. The Heart of What Was Lost, by Tad Williams
3. Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman
4. The Hero With a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell
5. The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth
6. Tales of Pirx the Pilot, by Stanislaw Lem
7. Side Jobs: Stories From the Dresden Files, by Jim Butcher
8. Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few, by Robert Reich

I liked all of the above very well, and encourage you to pick them up if you haven't. 

I think it's interesting to see the distribution as well. Two of these are non-fiction (one philosophy, one political economics), two are sci-fi, four are fantasy (with two urban and one alternate history). Additionally, two of them are collections of short stories (Side Jobs and Pirx the Pilot).

Strangely, my to-read list never seems to decrease, despite a consumption rate of one book a week. My long-lost love for reading has definitely been rediscovered, and is being pursued passionately.

Whatever inspires you, I hope you get a chance make the time to do more of it in the days to come. :-)