Link – Frozensoul.net | Review: In the Bed of a Duke

I have been blogging.  No really, I have – just not here.  And no, not every day either, but at least it’s more than … not blogging?  Whatever, it’s a blog, not the end of the world.  No excuses needed!

Anyhow, what I have been doing is writing short reviews on the books I’ve been reading, which are on my review blog.  That exists mainly because I have the spare domain name and it seemed a shame to be doing nothing with it.  And probably also because I feel happier having “life” things divided from “fannish” things, from long habit, even though there really is an overlap what with everything being crossposted to FB and LJ etc.  Once again: whatever.

So for the sake of ridiculous completeness, I’ll be linking my review posts from here.  Ta-da:

Review: In the Bed of a Duke | Frozensoul.net.

(Yes, sometimes I like to read total rubbish.  Don’t judge me! ;-p )

Reading Challenges

As I’ve mentioned before, I read a lot.  I always thought there wasn’t much point in me doing a reading challenge like the 52 books in a year one, since I habitually read much more than a book a week anyway.  However, on the Goodreads site, I came across the Seasonal Reading Challenge group, which posts a long list of tasks to be achieved over a season (defined as a three month period).  So I signed up.  Because while I read a lot, I only really read within a couple of genres (Sci fi / Fantasy / Urban Fantasy / SFR, and Historical Romance – I like my escapism, see!).  I used to read mystery / spy / thriller novels more when I was younger, but I moved away from them when I got more into reading sci-fi.  Anyway, as I think I also mentioned in a previous post, doing that challenge didn’t widen my reading as much as I’d hoped / planned.  It probably would have done if I didn’t have such a long list of books I already want to read.

So, last year I did the 144-books-in-a-year challenge instead.  And… I failed!!  I only read around 110 books.  Some of them were pretty doorstep-y, but still.  I spose that’s what happens when you only have one pair of hands – I can’t read and knit or spin at the same time, unless I’m listening to an audiobook.  Which I don’t do very often.

This year, the challenge group (this is also on Goodreads, by the way) has changed its parameters so that you can set your own goals to some extent.  I thought I’d be realistic and go for 100 books this time around.  That averages out to 8 1/3 books per month, and I’ve already read nine so far this year.  So that’s a good start.  If I find I’m reading more every month, there are points during the year where you can move your challenge goalposts, so I can increase to 150 if I want.  But I’m not going to particularly try for that, I’ll just see how I do.