At the beginning of 2013 I reset my perennial new year’s resolution to read more, and resolved once more to try and read 20 books this year. Today I can report that I have smashed my target, ground my previous average over many years into the dust, and read an incredible 39 books! That’s 195% of my target! I love reading. 🙂
- Reflections: On the Magic of Writing by Diana Wynne Jones
- Runemarks by Harris, Joanne
- The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner
- The Moon of Gomrath by Alan Garner
- Boneland by Alan Garner
- How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff
- My Name is Mina by David Almond
- What I Was by Meg Rosoff
- Precious Bane by Mary Webb
- Blue by Michael Rosen
- Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops by Jen Campbell
- More Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops by Jen Campbell
- The Adventures of a Sixpence by Harriet Boultwood
- In Search of Rex Whistler: His Life and His Work by Mirabel and Hugh Cecil
- Lark Rise to Candleford by Flora Thompson
- Trains and Lovers by Alexander McCall Smith
- The Blood Chamber and other stories by Angela Carter
- Alexandra Fry, Private Eye: The Curse of the Lion’s Heart by Angella Graff
- Runelight (Runemarks, #2) by Joanne Harris
- The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
- A Thread Through Time by Deborah Shepherd
- Mr Tumnal by T.E. Shepherd
- There Are Cats in This Book by Viviane Schwarz
- Bracelet of Bones by Kevin Crossley-Holland
- The Red House by Haddon, Mark
- Ghost Hawk by Susan Cooper
- The Owl Service by Garner, Alan
- Gobbolino the Witch’s Cat by Ursula Moray Williams
- Magical Tales: Myth, Legend, and Enchantment in Children’s Books edited by Diane Purkiss and Carolyne Larrington
- Burial Rites by Hannah Kent
- Four British Fantasists: Place and Culture in the Children’s Fantasies of Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper by Charles Butler
- Write edited by Phil Daoust
- Banzai’s Unexpected Voyage by Jane-Anne Hodgson
- The Awakening (The Judas Curse, #1) by Angella Graff
- Before Midnight by Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke, and Julie Delpy
- The Red Tree by Shaun Tan
- The Twelve Days of Christmas [Correspondence] by John Julius Norwich
- The Wave in the Mind: Talks & Essays on the Writer, the Reader & the Imagination by Ursula K. Le Guin
- Spider Circus by Alice Nuttall
Okay, so some of them are short picture books, and one might be my own work in progress (but I read it as a first-read novel…) but I think there’s a good mix of fiction and non-fiction, adult and children’s, and fantasy to other books in there. What I particularly like is there are some good re-reads in there. In previous year’s I would have been cautious of re-reading because of the need/time to read so many ‘new’ books.
So why have succeeded this year when in previous years’ I haven’t? I put it down to the acquisition at the back-end of last year of my Kindle Fire tablet, and the banishment of the laptop (and thus much distraction) upstairs to the study. I’ve read variously and voraciously from paper books and ebooks, dovetailing it with my own writing. For reading, this year has been a good one.
Tomorrow, I shall set my reading challenge for year ahead. Hopefully it will be more of the same.
