Thursday, January 04, 2007

Update and Recap for 2006



I'm back with a new home and a new vigor to document my readings for the year 2007. As you can see, it's been a while since I last posted on this blog but not for lack of interest. Some might now have known but I recently moved from NH to TX.

This was definitely a big life change since I sold the house that had been our home for over 7 year (the most stable home my daughter had ever known) and bought a beautiful place in the Fort Worth Area in TX. With the move it was not just the house I left behind but also my job. I loved working as a technical support engineer with Progress Software but I wanted to see if I could make a change in the direction my career was going.
Moving to TX gave me a chance for a new start in life and I have been enjoying the ride thus far.

Here is a picture of our new home.



Now that I'm finally settled in and have had a chance to fall into some semblance of a routine I think I can pick up my reviews again.

During the time I have been away I have not stopped reading but my reading definitely suffered a bit for lack of material and for lack of a comfortable setting.

Last weekend I was able to pull out my books and find them a home. I discovered that I am ready to move away from some authors that just are not doing it for me anymore. Catherine Coulter is one of them and Stephanie Laurens as well. These two authors have given me many hours of contented reading but I have found that most of their books follow some pattern and they eventually have melded together to a point that it feels as if I'm reading the same story over and over. The worse part of this is that I had collected most of their backlist which is very long. Now I have all these books that I really don't want to read. I think I'm just going to put them up on ebay and not dwell upon the $ I have lost.

Recap of 2006:

Recaping my reading for 2006 has been soooo much easier this year because my friend Rosario shared her spreadsheet to keep track of the books read in the year. This makes it quite simple to see at a glance any trends in my reading.

Total books Read in 2006: 103
Total New Authors: 27 (That was a big surprise to me!)
Total re-reads: 1 (so that means 102 were new reads!)
Best Reading Month was April with a total of 18 books read.
Worst Month was November with 0 books read.

I read an average of 227 physical pages since I listened to 31 Audio books.
I read mostly contemporaries with 48.5% going to that category and 10.7% of my reads were Alt. Reality/ Fantasy and the rest were some sort of historical (40.8%)

The bulk of my reading was from books published in the last 5 years with 27 of them being published in 2005

Sweetest finds for me were Pamela Clare and JR Ward. Both authors consistently showed their talent, book after book I read of theirs.

Goal for the New Year will be the same as last, which I honestly must say I did well at (while I was reading consistently).
I would like to read an average of 1 Anthology a month. That would put me at 12 Anthologies read at the end of the year and would put a significant dent in all the anthologies I have in my TBR pile.

I had wanted to finish two series this year but I could not even make a dent in them. So I want to commit myself to making a dent in the Carpathian series by Feehan. I'm giving up on the Cynster series; I think I have lost my love for those characters.

So I start a new year with a new outlook and new reading goals. With that said... let the reading begin!!!

0 comments:

 
Texas-BookWorm © 2009