Category: TBR Challenge

As Bing Crosby once sang, let’s start the new year right! It’s time once again to set the stage for our TBR Challenge.

This is the third year now for the Challenge, and I’ve discovered that it really has made me more aware of the books I purchased ages ago and have yet to read. It hasn’t stopped me from adding books to the fray, though! One of these days I’ll figure out how to address that 🙂

Here are my conditions for this year:

1. How many books from your TBR pile will you read? I’m going with 18 again this year, since I didn’t quite make it last year. That’s 1.5 books per month, which I should be able to manage even after allowing for writing and editing time, and other reading challenges I’ll be participating in.

2. How long have your books been waiting? For the purposes of this challenge, the books I read must have been acquired by me or placed on my library TBR list (which is still out of hand) before August 1, 2015. This means I can’t buy new books in January and count them toward my TBR Challenge come September–which I found myself doing at least once during the first year, and kind of defeats the purpose of the challenge.

3. How will you hold yourself accountable? Like years past, I’ll post here once a month to share my progress and see how you all are doing. I found that creating a Goodreads shelf and the dedicated page on this blog to be enormously helpful, too, so I’ll do both again. I’m a very visual person and being able to see the collection of books that I’ve read gives me a nice sense of accomplishment, which makes me want to read more TBR books.

So who’s in this year? I know I’m not the only one with a TBR mountain…range 😉 Leave a comment with your goal and conditions–how many books will you tame this year?

Happy New Year’s Eve, readers! It’s the last day of 2015–did you meet your goal?

I did not. I’m three titles short of the eighteen I set out to read from my TBR pile. Three–I was so close! I did more writing this year and picked up quite a few new editing clients, which is good in a lot of different ways. But that left me with much less reading-for-fun time than I anticipated, and I didn’t complete any of the reading challenges I participated in this year.

I learned a few things this year, though. I learned that I always write more slowly than I think I’m going to, so I’ll need to plan more realistically for that. I learned that I have a pretty solid reputation as an editor and that I love helping people spiff up their books. When given the option, I have always taken the editing job over days off in which I could be reading, which is something to keep in mind when I set my 2016 reading goals. I also learned that my new day job has more down time than I’m used to but I don’t write well in that environment, so it might be possible to get some reading time in at the office next year.

Tomorrow, I’ll take all that information–coupled with the number of books I’ve purchased over the past year–and decide what my goals will be for my various reading challenges. Tonight, however, I’m going to curl up with a book and not worry about which challenge it fits into 🙂

Happy Thanksgiving, fellow readers! We’ve got one month to go in our TBR Challenge–are you going to reach your goal?

I’ve been reading my little eyeballs off, but they’ve all been soon-to-be-released books (the editing business is, shall we say, booming). I’ve also been working on a short story that I planned on releasing in December (I’ll post more when I have an exact date) as a follow up to Save the Last Dance for Me, and that has consumed whatever free time I’ve had so my TBR bins have been sorely neglected. I did pledge to read 18 books that I’ve owned for a year or more, and so far I’ve read 15. That leaves me a month to get 3 books read from my TBR bins–certainly attainable. We’ll see what the next few weeks bring 😀

August is nearly gone and the end of summer is fast approaching in the Northern Hemisphere (though you’d never know it based on the weather in some places). Has the season been kind to your TBR pile?

Summer (and August in particular) turned out to be busier for me than I anticipated. I had a new house to unpack, several editing projects to tackle, and more responsibility at the day job. I haven’t actually read a book the whole month!

But during quite moments at the office I have been continuing to listen to Dragonfly in Amber by Diana Gabaldon. I read the book (and indeed, the whole series save #8) in paper form several years ago, so it isn’t a new story for me. But listening is a completely different experience for me than reading, and Davina Porter is a wonderful narrator. She manages the Gaelic and French phrases so much better than my eyes can, plus she handles the various accents as though she used them every day (though I will admit her American accent is a tad off). I can only manage to sound Canadian or slightly Celtic when I’m tired 😉

Two months down, fellow readers! How much has your TBR Pile shrunk?

Last summer I picked up a preference for print books, thinking to whittle down my physical store of books before I moved. That trend seems to be continuing, and I think it’s purely psychological now: I can actually see my bins getting less crowded. I’m slightly ahead of pace for the goal I set, too, but we’ll see how long that lasts. With the exception of a snow day, I’ll be teaching every weekday until Spring Break, which will very likely use up any energy reserves I might have. But if my students aren’t too demanding, I might still be able to sneak in a book or two 🙂