2015 Challenges Wrap-up

Well, I guess I can’t put it off any longer. I really need to take a look at my challenges and how I did in 2015 so I can plan for 2016. You can see my complete 2015 Challenge tally here. I tried hard not to take on too much, but…  let’s take a look.

2105 Goodreads Reading Challenge

This one is simple. You sign up to read a certain number of books — then start reading. I set my target at one book per week, or 52 books. And I reached that target relatively easily! I read 60 books in 2015. My Goodreads tally only shows 59 books, because I haven’t figured out how to let them know I read a book twice last year. I read A Sister To Honor once in February right after it was released, and then again in September for my book club. Read it if you haven’t — it’s a good one!

My Grade: A+

2015 Mount TBR Challenge

I signed up for Pike’s Peak, or reading 12 books from my shelf in 2015. This one always seems so simple. It is just a commitment to read books already on my shelf at the first of the year. But it’s not! Because I always get new books on my shelf that I want to read NOW and the others once again get shoved to the side. Also, there are some caveats that make it a little tricky; for example, even though that ARC has been on my shelf for six months, I can’t count it because it’s an ARC. But I did clear a book or two off my shelf that way, in addition to the 7 qualifying books I actually read. I also cleared away at least 2 that I started and realized I didn’t like them enough to struggle through them. So off they went. I definitely didn’t complete this challenge, but I think I did pretty good; better than last year, anyway!

My Grade: C

2015 Historical Fiction Challenge

I signed up for the Medieval level for this one, or 15 books. I surpassed that easily, reading 25 books! And I actually reviewed 17 of these on my blog. HOWEVER, I can’t give myself an A on the challenge, as I quite linking my reviews in August. Sometimes I couldn’t find the link for the current month, so I will give myself partial credit here, because I tried. However, I don’t think I ended up linking more than 10 of my reviews. I passed by not perfectly.

My Grade: B-

2015 Goodreads Choice Awards Challenge

This one was a simple concept and a challenge I created for myself — to read books from at least ten different genres chosen from previous Goodreads Choice nominees. And that is a problem, because even though I read some genres that I don’t always read a lot of, they were not Goodreads Choice nominees. Still, I didn’t do bad. My goal was to read Goodreads Choice nominees from 10 different genres, and I managed to read 8. (I’m not sure how one actually READS a cookbook, but I didn’t look at this pictures and read through some recipes that looked tasty, so I’m counting it! If I do this challenge again, I don’t think I will want to confine it to Goodreads Choice nominees!

My Grade: B

2015 Book Club Selections

This is not an actual challenge, but a goal. My book club reads and discussed 11 books each year. My goal is always to read them all. I did very well in 2015, not only reading all 11 selections, but also leading a couple of discussions and attending all but one meeting!

My Grade: A+

2015 Bookish Resolutions Challenge

I absolutely failed here, because one of the requirements was to post and update at the end of each month! I only posted two updates! But I can still evaluate my performance. Here were my goals:

1. Review and post reviews for 90% of the books I read in 2015 and cross-post reviews to Goodreads and LibrarCross-post reviews to Goodreads and Library Thing.
2. Find new homes for books I’ve read to clear space for new reads.
3. Explore ways to facilitate an online discussions of books
4. Explore moving my blog to Wordpress
5. Participate in at least 2 Bloggiestas in 2015.

And here are my results.

1. I read 59 books and posted 43 reviews, meaning I reviewed only 73% of the books I read. Not bad, but I didn’t reach my goal. I cross-posted a lot of reviews, but kind of got behind in the fall.
2. I did pretty good here. Each month I pull 5-10 books that I’ve read or that I have admitted I will never get to and offer them to family. If they don’t want them, I take them to my next book club meeting where they are up for grabs. Any that remain unclaimed at the end of the meeting are dropped off at the library on my way home – donated the the Friends of Library group for the big book sale. It’s caught on with my book club and others are starting to bring their unwanted books along. I’ve cleared 50 - 60 books from my shelved in 2015 by doing this! The bad news is that I went to Book Fair in August and bought about 20 books! Baby steps, right?
3. I looked at this and toyed with the idea of starting another blog just for discussions. I may still do this at some point, but for now, I’ve put the idea on hold. There doesn’t seem to be a big demand for it, and with my IRL book club and the nonfiction book club hosted by Katie at Doing Dewey Decimal, I feel like I don’t need another outlet to discuss books at this time.
4. I also looked at this, but unless I want to go to a pay site, there doesn’t seem to be an advantage to Wordpress over Blogger, and in fact, in many respects I think Blogger is better. I did start a genealogy blog on Weebly and it is working pretty well. If I decide Blogger isn’t working, I may consider moving to Weebly, but for now I plan to stay right here!
5. I participated in both Winter 2015 and Fall 2015 Bloggiestas, so I met my goal!

My Grade: B+

2015 Book Blogger Organization Challenge

I didn’t do so well on this one. I kind of gave up on it in March. I went to Florida for spring break and I never really caught up on my blogging this year! However, I did participate in Jan and Feb and it was only a 6-month challenge, so that should count for SOMETHING, I am right?

My Grade: D

Well, that’s it! My year of challenges all tallied and analyzed! Now….on to 2016!

2015 Reading Wrap-up - Part III

Consider this 2015 Reading Wrap-up - Part III. (You can click to read Part I and Part II if you missed it.)  I thought I was done with my 2015 Reading Wrap-up. But as I read other blogs, I realized that I’d never told you about my favorite books! So today, that is what I am doing.

Here are my best (and worst) of 2015!

Favorite reads of 2015

I could list a lot of books here but I will just give you my 5-Star reads for 2015.

A Sister To Honor by Lucy Ferris

I liked this one so much I read it twice!

Lone Star by Paullina Simons

This one left me with extreme book hangover! I still miss Jonny Rainbow!

When The Moon Is Low by Nadia Hashimi

I read this one just before the Syrian refugee crisis made headlines when a toddler washed up on shore. It left quite an impact on me.

Moloka’i by Alan Brennert

Another re-read. I first read it about ten years ago. I enjoyed it just as much this time.

Orphan #8 by Kim van Alkemade

I recommend this one to my book club and we will be reading it  in 2016.

Biggest Surprises

These are books that were pleasant surprises for me; they turned out to be better than I expected

In The Shadow of Blackbirds by Cat Winters

This is one that I had on my list when it first came out because it sounded interesting. But then I kind of lost interest in paranormal fiction and took it off my list. Then last fall it was chosen by Overdrive for Big Library Read. It still didn’t seem that interesting, but I decided to download it and read it if I had time. It turned out that I liked it quite a bit. It was paranormal, but it was also historical fiction, a bit of mystery, and a bit of romance!

The Sound of Glass by Karen White

This is another one that was more than I expected. I thought I was getting a light ‘chick lit’ type read, but it turned out to be more. It was a surprise and I enjoyed it.

The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson

This is another I was gifted with by the publisher. I don’t read a lot of suspense / thriller stories and I expected to trudge through this one. But I raced through it and enjoyed it very much.

Biggest Disappointments

The opposite of a pleasant surprise, these are books that left me disappointed in some way.

After You by Jojo Moyes

This was not a bad book; it’s just that I expected so much more. Me Before You was a pleasant surprise for me, and I was really looking forward to this one. Unfortunately, it was quite a let down for me after anticipating it with so much enthusiasm.

The Ocean At The End of The Lane by Neil Gaiman

This was a book club pick and not one I would have normally chosen because of the paranormal storyline. So it shouldn’t have been such a disappointment when I didn’t enjoy it. However, there was so much hype around the book and so many in my book club were excited to read it, that I’d hoped for a better reading experience.

The Pilot’s Wife by Anita Shreve

This one has been on my shelf a long time. I picked it up off an exchange shelf because I’d seen a few minutes of the movie while scanning channels several years ago, and it seemed to be a story I wanted to read. However, it turns out that the part of the movie I’d seen was the climax; near the end of the story. Rather than learn what happens next, I only saw what led up to the moments I’d seen. That was disappointing.

Best Book Club Reads

These are the books I read for my book club this year that I most enjoyed

A Sister To Honor by Lucy Ferris

Moloka’i by Alan Brennert

Me Before You by Jojo Moyes

Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger

Best covers

I could add a lot of covers here but these are the ones I like best. I’ll just say it with pictures!

Here are the links in case you want to read more! **Letters To The Lost by Iona Grey
**Moloka’i by Alan Brenner
**The Race For Paris by Meg Waite Clayton
**The Sound of Glass by Karen White
**Sisters of Shiloh by Kathy and Becky Hepenstal

Well, NOW I think I am done with my wrap-ups and ready to look at my 2015challenges….I think. I guess you’ll have to check back here to see if I think of anything else!

2015 Reading Recap - Part II

Yesterday I did a recap of my 2015 reading journey using statistics provided by Goodreads. You can see that post here. Today I am doing another recap, based on statistics kept in a spreadsheet developed by Shannon at River City Reading. In most cases, they agreed pretty well, but my spreadsheet breaks things down a little more. Let’s take a look!

First I want to do a comparison: My Goodreads stats say that last year I read 59 book or 20,583 pages, with an average of 349 pages per book. My spreadsheet says I read 59 books or 20,723 pages, with an average of 351 pages per book. The different averages are probably due to pages counts in different editions of the books.

Using data from my reading spreadsheet,  the chart below clearly shows that the majority of the books I read last year were between 300 and 400 pages long; 61%! If I stretch the range a little further, from 250 to 450 pages, I can add in another 24%. That leaves only 15%, or 9 books, outside of this range. Obviously I don’t read chunksters or short stories very often!

Let’s look a little closer at those ratings! First, a little about what ratings actually mean, as that has been a discussion on Goodreads lately. Different sites use different rating systems, and 3 stars at Goodreads does not mean the same thing as 3 stars means at Amazon or on my blog, for example. I think my ratings align pretty closely as those given at Goodreads, but if you would like more information of my ratings, please click here.  

Now let’s compare my stats with those from Goodreads. Goodreads says I gave an average rating of 3.5 stars in 2015. My spreadsheet agrees, telling me my average rating was 3.5 stars with a mean of 3.7 stars. You can see this clearly in the chart below. 
I guess Goodreads is right; using half stars doesn’t really affect the overall rating much! I think I’ll keep using them though. It makes me happier! Lucky for me, I liked most of what I read, some enough to recommend to others. It also shows that I don’t give out a lot of bad ratings, possibly because I’ve gotten pretty good at recognizing whether or not I will enjoy a book, combined with the fact that I’ve decided to DNF books I don’t like, rather than struggle through them!

Next, let’s talk about the books themselves; specifically the types of books I read, the formats I read, and where I get my books. In general, I don’t read a wide range of genres. I lean towards historical fiction and, for lack of a better term, ‘women’s fiction’. I challenged myself to diversify my reading, and I’ll do a post on that later, but the short answer is that I didn’t do very well in that respect! Here are the numbers!

I TOLD you I don't read memoirs!!! I don't read short stories, either. I DO read SciFi occasionally, but apparently not in 2015!

I tend to split my reading time between paperbacks and ebooks. I like to read on my iPad at night, after the lights go out and I’m cuddled up under the blankets, and Ido more of that in the winter. For outdoors reading or even reading in a comfy chair during bright, sunny days, paperbacks are the way to go. I don’t usually pick up a hardcover, unless it is the only option available to me. I tend to give my books away after I’ve read them, and paperbacks are so much lighter to hold. The covers are pretty AND I don’t have to decide whether to leave the book jacket on or off!

As you can see from the graph below, over half my book were read in paperback from, either galleys or regular paperbacks. A large portion were also read on my iPad as ebooks and egalleys. Only about 1 in 10 were read in hardcover form. (Just a note, sometimes I read in more than one format at a time. I may read a paperback during the day, but pick up on my iPad at night. And in the case of Moloka’i, I read a paperback for the most part, but with the busy holiday season underway, I also checked out the audiobook and listened as I decorated. But on my chart I’ve only listed a book once, in the format I read most of the book with.)
You can also see that I am a big fan of the library, with almost a third of my books being checked out either as ebooks or a print book! Another third of the books I read this past year were review copies given to me in order to participate in a book blog tour coordinated by TLC Book Tours. The other third of my books were obtained through a variety of sources; gifts, blog wins, from publishers, book fair, and even purchased! I’m a true book gatherer!

The last thing I want to look at today is the authors. Like everyone, I tend to have favorite authors. But I also like to read new authors and ‘new to me’ authors. I didn’t track ‘new to me’ authors in 2015; maybe that is something to try in 2016. However, I DID try to track authors whose debut novel I read. These also include authors who try a new format; for example, the first novel written by an author who has previously written nonfiction. As you can see, about a quarter of the books I read last year were debuts for the author.

I also tracked the gender of the author. I already know I tend to pick up a book written by a woman more often than one written for a man. No apologies here; I just do. But I wasn’t sure how often it happens. Obviously from looking at the chart, it is most of the time; only 8 of the 59 books I read last year were written by men!

Just a few words about diversity. To be honest, I don’t track ‘diversity’ in my books. I don’t care about an author’s ethnicity, nor do I have a way to really know the ethnicity, without doing some research about the author. When I decide to read a book, it is all about the pretty cover and then the synopsis. I think I probably read a pretty diverse selection, but I’m more interested in diversifying the genres I read than worrying about who wrote them or who the main characters are. So I won’t be tracking diversity any time soon.

Well, there it is; my 2015 Reading Journey in a few charts. I have just one more step to take before I start planning for 2016, and that is to take a look at the challenges I participated in (or not) in 2015! Look for that coming soon! And if you have a reading wrap up, be sure to leave a link in the comments so I can stop by and take a look!

Goodreads 2015 Reading Recap

A new year has begun. It’s probably time for me to talk about my Reading Journey 2015. It’s probably past time! But I spend a lot of time tracking my reading, so it is probably appropriate to take a few days to see where that journey took me! I’m going to start out looking at some numbers and how I did with my goals in reading and completing (or not!) challenges, and then take a few days to think about where I want to go in 2016.

I’m going to start today by looking at the actual books I read in 2015. I tracked these both on Goodreads and with a spreadsheet. If you are on Goodreads, you probably have already seen the pretty page Goodreads has prepared to summarize our 2015 reading journey. Sadly, though you can share a link on Facebook or Twitter, there is no way to preserve and share a copy of the full page. Maybe next year, Goodreads? I did capture a screenshot of the most important information, which I am sharing with you hear.

As you can see I read 59 book or a total of 20, 583 pages, or an average of 349 pages. (That jives well with a question I answered by an author earlier today, who asked if we prefer to read long books or short books. My answer was ‘medium books’ of ‘about 350 pages’!)

The longest book I read was Lone Star by Paullina Simons, coming in at 576 pages, and the shortest was a book of poems, Poisoned Apples by Christine Heppermann, coming in at only 107 pages.

The average rating I gave was 3.5 Stars, which is also good. It means I liked most of the books I read, and that I don’t just hand out stars easily. The most highly rated book by other people that I read in 2015 was Montpelier Today by Marylee MacDonald, with a rating of 4.33 Stars.

The most popular book of all that I read was The Girl On The Train by Paula Hawkins, read by 477, 545 readers, and the least popular book was An Old-Fashioned Christmas by Ellen Stimson, read by only 44 readers. These numbers are not all that surprising. These numbers are about readers and not ratings. The first came out early in the year with a lot of hype, and the latter came out only last month and had appeal for a very specific audience.

If you’d like to see more, take a look at my 2015 Goodreads Year in Review here!

This post turned out to be a little longer than I anticipated, so I am going to continue tomorrow with a post based on my reading spreadsheet.

2014 In Review — Reading

This week I am discussing my year in review. I’ve talked about my blogging and I’ve talked about my challenge participation. Now I want to review my reading. This will be pretty short. My goal was to read at least one book per week, or 52 books. I surpassed that by quite a bit. I finished 64 books as of today (I am in the middle of two others, but probably won’t finish them before the New Year rolls in). I actually was better about reviewing than I thought I was. I reviewed all but 7 books. This means I reviewed about 90% of the books I read, and if I were setting a goal for next year, 90% would be a good target. I also started 3 other books, but did not finish them and did not review them.

I am not opposed to review a book I DNF, if it is for a reason that I think others should be aware of, such as language or content issues, so poorly written or edited that it is difficult to follow, etc. But that is not the case with any of these books. They simply did not hold my interest at the time I picked them up and I had other books I wanted to get to. It’s possible they would hook me if I picked them up again, and I didn’t read enough to give a good review, so they are just marked as DNF.

Here is a list of the books I read in 2014. Reviewed titles are linked to my reviews.

Reviewed

1. Playing St. Barbara
2. The Shogun's Daughter
3. The Kitchen House
4. Becalmed
5. Band of Sisters
6. Reached
7. A Life Apart
8. A Snug Life Somewhere
9. Steeped In Evil
10. The Moon Sisters
11. The Last Runaway
12. Baseball Animals
13. Mrs. Lincoln's Rival
14. The Time Traveler's Boyfriend
15. The Light Between Oceans
16. The Weight of Blood
17. Second Star
18. The Unfinished Child
19. Up At Butternut Lake
20. The Daring Ladies of Lowell
21. The Astronaut Wives Club
22. For Such A Time
23. The All-Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion
24. A Beauty So Rare
25. The Pearl That Broke Its Shell
26. Little Island
27. The Vacationers
28. Mambo In Chinatown
29. The Hurricane Sisters
30. The From-Aways
31. Elizabeth Is Missing
32. Losing Touch
33. Necessary Lies
34. Sisterland
35. A Triple Knot
36. All I Know and Love
37. The Explanation For Everything
38. Big Little Lies
39. This Is The Water
40. Cancel The Wedding
41. The Chaperone
42. The Virtues of Oxygen
43. Five Days Left
44. The Agincourt Bride
45. A Matter of Mercy
46. American Blonde
47. I Shall Be Near To You
48. The Lost Tribe of Coney Island
49. Certainty
50. Leaving Time
51. The Moonlight Palace
52. The Silent Wife
53. Lost and Found
54. The Ripper's Wife
55. The Underground Girls of Kabul
56. The Look of Love
57. Dorothy Must Die

Not Reviewed

1. Station Eleven
2. Elsewhere
3. Accidents of Marriage
4. The Perfect Mother
5. The Girl Who Came Home
6. Hold Still
7. The Cost of Love and Sanity

DNF

1. Swan House
2. Never Coming Back
3. A Long Time Gone

2014 In Review — Challenges

Today I want to talk about challenges. To be very honest, this is an area in which I have a FAILING score!

You can see my ‘scorecard’ here.

I only entered a few challenges because based on past experience, I KNEW I would have a problem keeping up. But more scorecard is deceiving. Even when it LOOKS like I completed the challenge….I didn’t! For example, I went well beyond reading the 15 books I committed to for the Historical Fiction Challenge, BUT a big part of the challenge is posting reviews AND linking them on the Historical Tapestry website. I DID link about twelve of them, but then just gave up.

Let’s take a closer lookllll

2014 Historical Fiction Challenge

I committed to the Medieval level, or to reading a minimum of 15 books. I actually read and posted reviews for 24 books, and read a few more that I did not review. But as I mentioned above, I only linked 12 of my reviews to the Historical Tapestry website, so I have to count this as a fail. I didn’t not complete the challenge, though I came close. I will probably sign up for this one again, because I DO read a lot of historical fiction. It should not be this hard to remember to go link my reviews!

My grade — D+

2014 TBR Pile Challenge

This one was a miserable failure. I committed to reading 12 books that were on my TBR at the beginning of the year. I only succeeded in reading 4. On the plus side, I did actually review all 4 books! And I started another book, The Swan House by Elizabeth Musser, but it did not hold my interest. So I did kind of knock a book off my TBR! I think one of the problems with this challenge was that I had to choose which books I wanted to read way back in January. That just didn’t work for me. I may try to do a modified version of this one next year that I set up just for myself. I really would like to knock another 12 books from my shelf this year, so I may set that as a goal, but do some ‘free range’ reading to accomplish this; pick from my shelf whatever suits me at the time.

My Grade — F

2014 Mount TBR Challenge

This one seemed like a simple idea; to read 12 books that were on my TBR. However, it wasn’t as simple as it sounded. They had to physically be on my shelf before January of last year. That meant NO library books! I’m not sure if I will do this one. I actually won a lot of books in the last three months that I want to be sure to get to, so I may just accomplish this one this year. I plan to cut back on my book tour commitments so that I WILL have more time for ‘free range’ reading.

My Grade — FFF!!!

2013 Goodreads Choice Awards

This was a challenge I made for myself, in an attempt to diversify my reading. It didn’t work. My plan was to look through the nominees from the 2013 GoodRead Choice voting, and choose to read 10 books from various categories. Like I said, it didn’t work. I didn’t even try tracking categories, so I can’t even say if I came close. Will I try this next year? Maybe, but only if I think of a better way to do it.

My Grade — FFF!!!

2014 GoodRead Reading Challenge

I love this one because it is so easy! All I have to do is tell GoodReads how many books I want to read and then mark them as read as I complete them. No review necessary, and I really don’t even need to star-rate them! I DO like to add reviews and if all went perfectly I would add each book to my ‘score card’. But even without reviews, I did complete the challenge. I challenge myself to read one book per week, or 52 books. As of today I have finished 64, and may get another one or two done before the year ends! So yes, I will definitely do the 2015 GoodReads Reading Challenge next year…..if I can find it! That seems to be the real challenge for me each year; finding the link to sign up! Anyone know where it is??

My Grade — A+

2014 Book Club Reads

My book club meets monthly, with a new book each month except December, when we have our Christmas brunch. (Am I the only one who went looking for a book titled ‘Christmas Brunch’ when I saw it on the schedule???) Most years I miss reading one or two books because I give up on them (particularly if they are a memoir!) or I know I won’t be there. But this year, even though I was not able to attend all the meetings, I did actually read all the books! And I posted reviews for all but two! Of course, this is an informal challenge that I participate in by default as a member of a book club, so I will be doing this one again in 2015. We already have our first five books selected and I have them on reserve!

My Grade — A

That’s my 2014 Challenge wrap-up. I’ll be back later with updates on how I plan to challenge myself in 2015! How did you do this year? And really….does anyone know where that link is to the 2015 GoodReads Reading Challenge?!