The 2015 Annual Reading Challenge Discussion Thread

[ATDrake]

Well, I seem to be at 1/18th of my tentatively proposed goal (to read at least 6 new French-language books from my growing francophone collection).

I'm 1/3rd of the way through the first francophone novel of the year, which is the sequel to the one I'd originally planned (the 1st-in-series for Leena Lehtolainen's Bodyguard trilogy having shown up on sale in English translation in the meantime, so I read that and decided to go straight to the next, which I only have in French).

Going slower than I thought it would be (even allowing for my in-need-of-improvement francophone reading skills), but that's actually mainly due to my having been distracted by a bunch of other things (including my Region B import Blu-Rays for Borgen and The Killing (original Danish version, no the US remake) arriving from Amazon UK, which led to a binge-watch of all the seasons), and I'm actually mildly pleased that I've been able to follow the story tolerably well at a decent pace without having to resort to the Sony's built-in dictionary as much as I thought I'd have to.

It's actually kind of interesting, since apparently the French versions were translated from the German versions which were translated from the original Finnish, so I'm kind of wondering what may have gotten "lost in translation" somewhere along the point, and I may just go back to my French copy of the 1st-in-series to compare it with the English translation, which was done directly from the Finnish.

[orlok]

I set myself a very non-challenging target of one book per week, as I have got a bit fed up with constantly checking my percentage progress through a book, rather than reading it at a pace that allowed me to enjoy it. That said, I'm now at 77% of my target so I could have been a bit more ambitious...

[Hampshire Nanny]

Goodreads tells me that I'm 1 book ahead of schedule to complete 200 books this year. My pace is seriously affected by the ease of reading (some books just seem to "read fast"), deadlines (library due dates), and my mood. I'm known to be reading more than one book at a time -- setting one aside when it doesn't grab me and then picking it up later.

Stats:

Total books read: 84
Total pages read: 23,240

Format:
eBooks: 68
audiobooks: 5
DTB: 11

By genre:
Adventure: 4
Fantasy: 14
Mainstream: 6
Mystery: 32
Non-Fiction: 2
PUF: 8
Romance: 4
SciFi: 15

Library books: 36 (+ 4 KLL)

Progress toward series challenge: 12 of 36 books

Eclectic Reader Challenge: 7 of 12 books/categories

[jbcohen]

Originally Posted by Hampshire Nanny

Goodreads tells me that I'm 1 book ahead of schedule to complete 200 books this year. My pace is seriously affected by the ease of reading (some books just seem to "read fast"), deadlines (library due dates), and my mood. I'm known to be reading more than one book at a time -- setting one aside when it doesn't grab me and then picking it up later.

Stats:

Total books read: 84
Total pages read: 23,240

Format:
eBooks: 68
audiobooks: 5
DTB: 11

By genre:
Adventure: 4
Fantasy: 14
Mainstream: 6
Mystery: 32
Non-Fiction: 2
PUF: 8
Romance: 4
SciFi: 15

Library books: 36 (+ 4 KLL)

Progress toward series challenge: 12 of 36 books

Eclectic Reader Challenge: 7 of 12 books/categories

Did you get these stats from goodreads? If you did then you know sometthing I don't but would like to know. How did you get Goodreads to give you these stats?

[Dngrsone]

I am ahead of my goal, despite taking the month of April off (what book can follow a reading of LoTR?). but I am a loss to decide what to read next. (I have a decent-sized TBR pile, just not in the mood at this moment).

[pdurrant]

Oh - and on my 'read my 54 books bought back in 2005 and 2006' challenge, I'm doing very well. 28 down, 26 to go.

[Hampshire Nanny]

Originally Posted by jbcohen

Did you get these stats from goodreads? If you did then you know sometthing I don't but would like to know. How did you get Goodreads to give you these stats?

Oh my! Nope. I'm a list keeper. Others might use spreadsheets, but I'm hostile to them so I just keep a simple text file on my laptop. For each book, I record title, author, genre, start date, end date, format, source, and number of pages. Then I keep running totals by month and YTD. For books which don't have traditional pages, I use the page count from Goodreads or Amazon, selecting the mass market paperback edition if it's available in that format.

The only way I can think of to get these kind of stats from Goodreads would be to set up a shelf for each category.

[bfisher]

I had a very slow beginning. For some reason, I could read very little from January to April. I finally reread a few books I've enjoyed, which got me back in a reading mood.

One of my goals was to read at least 50 books, and at least half of these from my TBR, which is an overhanging cliff.

So far this year:
Books not on my TBR
Ten Cities That Made An Empire by Tristram Hunt
When Books Went to War by Molly Guptill Manning
Turner by Peter Ackroyd (a shortie - is this where Mike Leigh got his ideas for the movie?; readable but thin on Turner as an artist)
anyway, so far 3 non-TBR books

Books From My TBR
Rebellion by Peter Ackroyd - a readable history of the Stuarts and the English resistance to the dynasty

1636: The Viennese Waltz
1636: Seas of Fortune
1636: Commander Cantrell in the West Indies
It’s been so long since I read a Ring of Fire book that I went back and reread the mainline books.

Churchill’s Bomb by Graham Farmelo (good account of how Britain fell behind in the atomic race after a promising start.

The Discovery of France by Graham Robb (good account of La France profonde)

The Fireseed Wars by John F. Carr
Siege of Tarr-Hostigos by John F. Carr (I was a big fan of H.Beam Piper’s Lord Kalvan Of Otherwhen, and have had John F. Carr’s continuation on my TBR for quite a while)

Many Thousands Gone: First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America by Ira Berlin (Ira Berlin has done for African-Americans something like what David Hackett Fischer did for early Anglo-American history in Albion’s Seed)

Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South by Stephanie McCurry (a good book about internal power relationships in the American Civil War South - it made a lot of things click for me)

Foxglove Summer by Ben Aaronovitch - at least as good as the first four PC Peter Grant books; can't wait for the next one

I’ve had most of Alan Furst’s Night Soldier books on my TBR for quite a while. I re-read Night Soldiers; it reminded me why I have the books on my TBR. I finally read Dark Star (#2), The Polish Officer (#3), The World At Night (#4), Red Gold (#5), Kingdom of Shadows (#6), and Blood of Victory (#7). It’s not a series as such, more of a universe - continental Europe during the Nazi-Stalin era. There are connected characters and themes, so they are better read in sequence. I’m enjoying them immensely for the atmosphere, so I expect to read #8-#13 over the summer.

Finishing up Brenda Wineapple’s Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877.

18 books so far, which is a bit off the pace to meet my goal, but I hope to catch up soon.

[CRussel]

Well, I'm back on track to hit my base target of 120 books for the year (10 a month), mostly because of some serious reading in the last couple of weeks while I was in recovery mode. And I'm "sort of" managing to keep stuff logged, though that's a bit iffy, as always. One thing that's helping me keep to my targets is Audible -- I find I'm reading a fair number of books via Audible, either wholly or in part.

[jbcohen]

Originally Posted by CRussel

Well, I'm back on track to hit my base target of 120 books for the year (10 a month), mostly because of some serious reading in the last couple of weeks while I was in recovery mode. And I'm "sort of" managing to keep stuff logged, though that's a bit iffy, as always. One thing that's helping me keep to my targets is Audible -- I find I'm reading a fair number of books via Audible, either wholly or in part.

Not taking any short cuts I take it like a five page short story counting as a book.

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by jbcohen

Not taking any short cuts I take it like a five page short story counting as a book.

Well, when it's a 50 hour book (Shogun), that hardly qualifies as a 5 page short story.

I count a full book as a full book, however read. And when I have several shorter works, I tend to roll them up into a single book read. Or, in other cases, I simply record them and don't count them to the total. Depends on whether I read several shorter works in a lump, as I just did with the Baen Free Stories for the last two years.

[jbcohen]

Originally Posted by CRussel

Well, when it's a 50 hour book (Shogun), that hardly qualifies as a 5 page short story.

I count a full book as a full book, however read. And when I have several shorter works, I tend to roll them up into a single book read. Or, in other cases, I simply record them and don't count them to the total. Depends on whether I read several shorter works in a lump, as I just did with the Baen Free Stories for the last two years.

So what's your standard for a books length? When you combine shorter works how do you judge when you have enough to count as a book? The Hugo Awards uses the length of 40K words.

[Dngrsone]

I am well ahead of the game for my challenge. I read books of all sizes: novellas to epics broken down by necessity into three separate books.

If a novella doesn't count as a book, then what about LoTR? Is it one book or three? I can't be bothered by page count at this stage of the game, when most of my reading is through eBook, where page numbering is dependant on the size of your screen... so for me, a book is a book.

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by jbcohen

So what's your standard for a books length? When you combine shorter works how do you judge when you have enough to count as a book? The Hugo Awards uses the length of 40K words.

Honestly, I don't have a fixed number. I just wing it. For one thing, I don't track the number of words in a book, and don't feel any compulsion to change that. But when I've read several stories or a couple of longer novellas or equivalent, I figure it's a "book's worth" or so.

In other notes, I'm doing fairly well this year on my challenges. I've _bought_ 75 books, and only read 67, but that's deceptive. If I buy the ebook and the Audible book, I count it as two books, but I usually only "read" one - a combination of reading and listening together. Also, there are some books in the bought category that I'd rather I hadn't, and I've abandoned reading. These I need to learn from, since in most cases, I should have held off buying until I knew the series was going to keep my interest. I have a tendency to like the first book, and buy several more before I really have a chance to discover if the series really has legs.

[Hampshire Nanny]

Originally Posted by Hampshire Nanny

Goodreads tells me that I'm 1 book ahead of schedule to complete 200 books this year.

And now, Goodreads reports that I'm 3 books behind schedule! I need to complete 7 books by the end of June. I'm 70% through the book I'm reading on my Kindle (The Lost Concerto by Helaine Mario) and more than 80% through the audio book I'm listening to (Confessions of a Murder Suspect by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro). I start a cross-country road trip on Sunday morning -- I'm the passenger, not the driver -- so I have every confidence that I can complete at least 7 books before midnight on Tuesday! And, I hope to get a bit of a jump into the second half of the year, reading like a crazy person through the 4th of July weekend.