2012: The Year in Review

This has been an odd reading and blogging year for me…

I only finished 68 books this year, which is my lowest total since I started blogging and keeping track in 2005. Mostly, I think this is due to other things competing for my attention. I used to do a lot of reading during the downtime at my pool matches, but since I got my netbook last February, I spend more than half of that time either working on the blog or doing other stuff online. I also have been spacing my audiobooks out a bit more, listening to podcasts for a week or two in-between each book. Add to that the fact that I work from home 2 days a week, so I’m not in the car and I don’t have my lunchtime reading block, and it results in fewer books!

I also struggled a lot with the efficiency of blogging this year. I was behind in writing reviews from the very start, and never caught up until this week. I needed to find a balance between the amount of information I wanted to provide with my review and the amount of time it took to put all of that information together. I think that this fall I finally worked it out, using a combination of plug-ins to streamline the blogging process for me. Now, if I have pre-written the actual review, I can get a blog post up in about 15 minutes. This is really crucial for me.

My goals this year are simple: keep up with the reviewing so I don’t end up with a giant backlog, and write more conversational posts. That doesn’t sound too hard, right?

Here are my favorite books from the last year:

• A Perfect Blood (Kim Harrison)
• Moloka’i (Alan Brennert)
• Faithful Place (Tana French)
• The Sandcastle Girls (Chris Bohjalian)
• More Than You Know (Penny Vincenzi)
• 11/22/63 (Stephen King)
• Santa Olivia (Jacqueline Carey)

I hope you have a happy new year!