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2014 is coming to an end fellow readers–did you meet your TBR Challenge goal?

My initial commitment was 12 books from my heaping TBR bins/kindle/iPod. I read 21 books that were six months old or older (yay!). Looking back through the Goodreads shelf I made, I can see that I favored paper books over electronic ones, and that no audio books made it into the fray. I know what happened with the audio books (I’m still working on one enormous one, and half-listened to a couple as I drifted off to sleep at night), but the paper vs. electronic count surprises me a bit. E-books are physically easier to read for me–no mass market paper back to squint at or pry open, no weighty hardcover to lift and hold. But I’m something of a tactile person, and there’s nothing like holding a real book in your hands 🙂

I also mentioned in my original post that I’d wanted to go with a small number of TBR books in order to leave room for other reading challenges and writing time. I completed the other two challenges I began, and incorporated TBR books into both (two birds, one stone right?). But the writing time never materialized. That’s something I definitely need to work on next year.

Overall, I think the TBR Challenge was a good idea. Knowing that I was posting updates to this blog and keeping a public Goodreads shelf helped motivate me. When it was time for a new book I’d find

myself digging through my bins and reading blurbs, searching for one that still sounded interesting months (and in some cases, years) after I purchased it. That was a lot of fun–like a kid sampling treats in an ice cream shop, looking for just the right flavor–and something I didn’t realized I missed until I started doing it again. In all the tumult of 2014, digging through my TBR bins was also comforting for me, and gave me a sense of accomplishment as the piles in some bins shrunk. I have no idea what 2015 has in store for me, but I’m going to make sure a TBR Challenge is involved 😀