What I've Been Reading

At the beginning of each year, I tend to join lots of reading challenges. This year, I've tried to limit myself to only a couple of them. The primary challenge is hosted by Goodreads and is simply a challenge to set a goal for the number of books to be read. Since 150 books a year involves enough of a challenge without being totally unreachable, that's what I signed up for again this year. So far, I've completed 50 books, which Goodreads calculates to be 2 books ahead of schedule.

The second challenge that I am working on this year is to complete some of the series which I have started. This challenge is being run at BookObsessed. I picked 9 series that I wanted to focus on this year. If I finish those (or at least read all the books which have been published so far), then they will total 59 of the 150 books I'm striving for. So far, I've only read 5 of these 59, but I also started 8 new series this year and have read further into 7 other series which were not on my original list.

We just returned home from a three week combined business and pleasure trip. It involved a cross-country road trip (from Texas to Virginia and return) with side trips to Washington, DC, and Birmingham, AL. During this trip, I read 9 books and listened to 8 disks (of 9) of an audiobook. I used much of the time in the car to read. Here's what I was reading during the last 3 weeks of April:

1. The Bishop at the Lake by Andrew Greeley
2. The Archbishop in Andalusia by Andrew Greeley
3. Arcane Circle by Linda Robertson
4. Kitty Goes to Washington by Carrie Vaughn
5. The Siren Depths by Martha Wells
6. Delete All Suspects by Donna Andrews
7. Be Still My Vampire Heart by Kerrelyn Sparks
8. All I Want for Christmas is a Vampire by Kerrelyn Sparks
9. A Bicycle Built for Murder by Kate Kingsbury
10. A Week in Winter by Maeve Binchy

My regular reading blog is offline for a while. I've had it—and a bunch of other web stuff—hosted with a friend who has been running servers for years and years. His wife was the business manager, and after she died about 18 months ago, his billing did not go out and many of his customers (myself included) didn't think about making our annual payments for the web hosting. Then, earlier this year, his "day job" ended and he lost his Internet connection a week ago. Now that emergency bills have been sent out, I'm hoping that things will be restored soon. In the meantime, I'm going to have to post more over at Livejournal.

Update 2 Jan 2014: Now that my reading blog has been relocated, I'm restoring all the book-related posts from Livejournal over here.