75 Books...More or Less! discussion

I read 104 books in 2012, which exhausted me a bit. Or rather, trying to stay ahead of my self-imposed Goodreads Reading Challenge exhausted me, not the reading. This year I'm going to ignore the challenge and read what I want, focusing on some lengthy and/or difficult books I avoided last year, but I'm pretty sure I'll manage to read 75 without much problem. If not, I just hope you all forgive me, because I've been on this group too long to move to a different 50-book-challenge group instead. I don't like change!

2013 Reading List 1-10
1) Hotel World by Ali Smith (Fiction, 242 pages) ***** (Review)
2) Last of the Old Guard by Louis Auchincloss (Fiction, 212 pages) *** (Review)
3) Purple and Black by K. J. Parker (Novella, 113 pages) ****
4) Blue and Gold by K. J. Parker (Novella, 99 pages) ****
5) The Whole Story and Other Stories by Ali Smith (Short fiction, 178 pages) ***

6) Vampire Conditions by Brian Allen Carr (Short fiction, 115 pages) ***** (Review)
7) I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita (Fiction, 613 pages) *****
8) The City & the City by China Miéville (Mystery/sci-fi, 336 pages) **** (Review)
9) The First Person: And Other Stories by Ali Smith (Short fiction, 207 pages) **
10) Old New York: Four Novellas by Edith Wharton (Novellas, 315 pages) ****

Abandoned: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Abandoned: Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

Some goals for 2013:

1) Maintain author gender parity. At the end of 2011, I realized that only 17 of the 80 books I read that year had been written by women. In 2012, after making an effort to fix that, I read 48.5 books by women (the .5 is for a co-authored work) out of 104. I'm not going to strive for complete 50-50 equality this year (and I shouldn't just stick with the gender binary), but my goal is to continue finding and reading new women authors I either ignored or neglected when I was younger.

2) Read more than 1-2 books by each author. I have a bad habit of sampling authors, only reading one or two titles and jumping to the next, so this year I'm going to explore a few specific writers as well: Edith Wharton, Ursula K. Le Guin, Robert Coover, Herman Melville, Henryk Sienkiewicz, etc.

3) Read some doorstoppers. Like I said in my first post, I avoided reading some larger works last year to achieve my 100-book goal, so this year I want to settle down with some 500-1000 pagers, plus a few 1000+ monsters, and take my time.

4) Read more nonfiction!

5) Review, review, review.

Jacob wrote: "I'm pretty sure I'll manage to read 75 without much problem. If not, I just hope you all forgive me, because I've been on this group too long to move to a different 50-book-challenge group instead. I don't like change!"

Whether you hit 75 or not, we're glad to have you!

2013 Reading List 11-20

11) There but for the by Ali Smith (Fiction, 236 pages) *****
12) The Public Burning by Robert Coover (Fiction, 534 pages) ***** (Review)
13) Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street by Herman Melville (Novella, 64 pages) ***** (Review)
14) A Wizard of Earthsea (Earthsea Cycle #1) by Ursula K. Le Guin (Fantasy, 184 pages) ****
15) The Little Trilogy by Henryk Sienkiewicz (Short fiction, 245 pages) *** (Review)
...

Abandoned: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Charleen wrote: "Whether you hit 75 or not, we're glad to have you!"

Thanks, Charleen!

Jacob, I know everyone already said it but no need to move! Well keep you no matter how many books you read. The goal of the group is to read 75 but we have people with many different goals and that is fine too :)