A Month of Favorites: Introduction

Happy December, everyone!  You may recognize this month as being the (or, um, another) month in which I unintentionally let my blog go dark while being swept away by either the busy-ness or the lethargy of life.  This year, with the help of a few clever bloggers and one fun December event, I'm hoping to reverse the December curse.  This December the lovely ladies at Estella's Revenge, Girlxoxo, and Traveling with T have brought us a fun December event all about sharing our favorite things from this year, bookish and otherwise.  In between my blundering through my back log of reviews before the first of the year, playing along with The Month of Favorites seems like a fun and easy way to up my blogging this December.  Check out the link if you want to see all the post topics and join the fun!

Today, we're introducing ourselves and sharing a little about our reading this year.  I'm Megan, and I've been blogging here at Leafing Through Life for 7 years now.  Yes, this is the year that my blog hit it's lucky seventh birthday, and I can't believe I'm still at it.  If you're new here, you haven't heard me go on and on about what a slow reader I am.  I'm definitely not working with a high quantity of books read for the year, but it's still been a banner year for reading in other ways.  Here's how...

• This is the year that I finally started getting over my fear of chunksters.  I was never afraid of a book 500+ pages long before I started blogging, but being a slow reader and a blogger mix poorly with the reading of chunksters.  This year I stopped putting pressure on myself to finish more books and started just reading.  It's paid off wonderfully, considering I've read the same amount of books as last year at this time, but way more pages.  Good chunksters aren't scary - they're awesome!
• This is also the year that I really started to embrace not finishing books.  I've never been the sort to force myself to finish books I'm not enjoying, but this year, I think I've done a particularly good job of recognizing when it was time to call it quits on a book that just wasn't doing it for me.  Life's too short for mediocrity, right?
• Finally, this is the year of the Readathon.  I've always been a big fan of Dewey's 24 Hour Readathon, but I've never sampled any of the other readathons cropping up around the book blogosphere.  This year I did the Bout of Books twice and loved having a low pressure readathon that went on for a week and helped me refocus on reading instead of life's many distractions while staying plugged into the book blogging community.  

Does your inner stat hound care about my stats?  Mine kind of does, but only in the loosest kind of way.  So breaking it down in a nutshell, my reading has been...

1/5 chunksters, about half review copies and half from own collection (this is very excellent!), definitely skewed toward female authors (think 60/40ish), predominantly composed of new to me authors, almost all paper books rather than ebooks (sorry, Kindle), mostly fiction (1 non-fiction book for every 7 fiction books, yikes!), and had a generous sprinkling of YA among the "grown-up" books (a welcome departure from my YA lacking recent past).

So, yeah, it's been a nice year, a different sort of year for reading and blogging.  Low pressure, higher page counts, and more fun in general.   I'm going to wrap this up for now, but I'm looking forward to sharing some of this year's favorites as the month marches on, and I'll hope you'll join the fun!

What's something unique about your year in reading?

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