Wrapping Up the Spring Reading Thing

Alas, I have failed at my goal for the Spring Reading Thing...sort of. When I started, my goal was to read all those pesky books that were waiting for review or that I owed to somebody from BookObsessed at the time. More importantly, I wanted to boost my reading numbers. I got off to a sorry start to reading this year, and I was hoping to read a bit more than I started out the year reading. I failed at the first goal and succeeded at the second.

Here are the books that I claimed I was going to read...

Stealing Heaven by Elizabeth Scott
How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff
Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan
Uglies by Scott Westerfield
The Beet Queen by Louise Erdrich
The Widows of Eden by George Shaffner
Fever 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson
Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortensen
Inside the Mind of Gideon Rayburn by Sarah Miller
A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray

Then, here are the books I actually read...

Stealing Heaven - Elizabeth Scott
The Beet Queen - Louise Erdrich
Speak - Laurie Halse Anderson
Fever 1793 - Laurie Halse Anderson
The Widows of Eden - George Shaffner
The Cactus Eaters - Dan White
Black Wave - Jean and John Silverwood
Queen of the Road - Doreen Orion
A Great and Terrible Beauty - Libba Bray
Three Girls and Their Brother - Theresa Rebeck
Forgive Me - Amanda Eyre Ward

With Forgive Me squeaking in just under the wire (so under the wire in fact that I haven't had time to write my review of it yet), I made my number goal. Some unexpected reading "have tos" snuck in after I made my list and threw off my plan, but all in all, I'm pretty satisfied with how it turned out. I read some great books (ones that I was planning on and ones that I really wasn't).

All of my reads were written by authors that were new to me except for Forgive Me and The Beet Queen. My favorite? Probably A Great and Terrible Beauty for absorbing me so much that I was nearly able to forget that I had a dreadful cold while reading it. The Cactus Eaters and Queen of the Road tie for a close second for laugh out loud funny vicarious traveling. And I'm still plodding through Three Cups of Tea from my original list(which puts me at eleven and a half books, so, I did really good, right? Ha!), which is a good, informative, and even inspirational book but not a quick read by any means especially since I seem to be suffering some non-fiction burnout. I told myself I would read more non-fiction this year, and I have! Perhaps too much! 6 of 18...that's a solid third of my reading that's been non-fiction, and that's not counting Three Cups of Tea or those two other, ahem, I mean three other non-fiction titles I've agreed to review in the near future, and the five others that might well be coming in the mail shortly from Elle. Yikes! Anyhow, I digress.

All in all, I have to say that the Spring Reading Thing was a pretty rewarding experience for me despite my not quite success. It definitely got me reading more than I'd been, and that's just what I was hoping would happen. Thanks again to Katrina for hosting, and I might well join up should you choose to host a Fall Into Reading challenge!

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