Monday, December 1, 2014

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?

14 comments:

  1. I'm trying to shake my Inner Stat Hound, but it's hard! I want to care about the quality, not the quantity. It's so hard!!!

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  2. Go youuuu! Chunkster reading is so great, and I've done far too little of it this year. And readathons! I also love Bout of Books.

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  3. I need to learn to give up on books that aren't rocking my world.

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  4. I did Dewey's readathon in April & October. Actually lasted 24 hours the first time, bogged down at hour 17 in October, but I had fun both times. Awesome event!

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  5. That's great that you're reading chunksters! I love them and read some great ones this year (Natchez Burning and We Are Not Ourselves come to mind). I even have a chunksters book list (called Time to Kill) on my blog!
    I also need to embrace your goal of knowing when to quit a book - I'm horrible about that and end up wasting so much time!

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  6. Blogging definitely helped me to learn to quitting a book I'm not enjoying. If nothing else, I'm hyper aware of how many other books I would rather be reading than a dud!

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  7. I feel ya on the chunksters. I love them, but I know if I read them, it's going to show in my end-of-the-year stats (which, by the way, is something only I really care about) -- I should probably follow your lead and count pages instead of books. Something to think about for the new year ...

    Happy December!

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  8. I'm definitely still struggling with my fear of chunksters! I think my issue is that I rarely find books with characters that I want to remain with for such a long period of time. That's a great idea to look at the amount of pages read!

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  9. I didn't know you'd been blogging seven years! Don't they go by quickly?!

    I love chunksters, and somehow have never been afraid of them. Just because something is long doesn't mean it's impossible to read, or finish, right? I remember reading Atlas Shrugged and Gone With The Wind in high school, and while I didn't read many books, those two have surely stuck with me.

    Glad you're discovering their joy!

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    1. I was never afraid of the chunksters until I started blogging. Then I got into putting pressure on myself to finish more books instead of taking the time to enjoy good ones. Oddly enough, I can finish a long book that I'm loving much quicker than a very short book that's just so-so. Glad I've finally gotten out of the "pointless blogging pressure" phase so that I can get down to rediscovering my lost love of chunky books! :D

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  10. I read a few chunksters this year, but I'd rather read 2 books than 1 thick one in most cases.

    This year I listened to more audio books than ever it seems and I do enjoy them a lot.

    Congrats on 7 years (6) for me.

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    1. I never got onto the audiobook bandwagon. I keep saying I'd like to try getting into audio by re-reading some favorites that I'll probably never bother to re-read in print, because, you know, life being short and all that.

      Thanks and congrats on your 6 years! The time flies, doesn't it?

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  11. Good for you for starting to give up on books that aren't doing it for you! I sometimes keep on reading- even when I'm not loving it. I need to embrace the DNF.

    Chunksters, I like the small-ish ones (after 550 pages my mind starts to wonder and my arms start to hurt!)

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