Reading Goals for 2014 + Required Reading 2014: January

What an awesome reading year 2013 was! I read a total of – drumroll please – 52 books, which means on the average, I can finish reading one book per week. I don’t do reading challenges where I require myself to finish a specific number of books for a given period of time, so I don’t really get to track how many books I’ve read so far. So 52 books for 2013? Yay!

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Reading Goals for 2014

I’m still not doing that reading challenge, though. I will keep my 2013 resolution to read whatever I want, whenever – only the book club’s books for the month are welcome exceptions. It was a good reading year, like I said, and I intend for 2014 to go the same route. However, I do have a couple of reading goals that I have set for the year:

• Inspired by an Instagram image uploaded by Lucy of Fully Booked featuring the complete works of one of my favorite authors, Kazuo Ishiguro, I have decided to devote an entire month to (a) favorite author/s and read his/her works alone, starting with – yes – Ishiguro and Neil Gaiman. For the other months, I will include at least one book from other favorite authors in the reading list. That way, every month, I get to read something from my favorites.

• I don’t have a huge review backlog (at last count, I only have 7 pending) but I will try to trim it down write all of those so the number won’t balloon when I add more books.

And then of course, there's still The Spark Project - I may have posted less this 2013 than the year before that, but the feature is still around and I'm hoping to get more material to be published this year. I still have the Bookmarks Galore posts coming because I have a lot of awesome friends who contribute to my bookmark collection, so there's so much more to expect from that one. I also had fun joining blog tours last year to feature local writers' works, so let's see if there will be more of that this year.

Required Reading for January

For the first month of the new year, I only have one book to conquer (and I really mean that word, conquer): I put it up on my January 2013 reading list and began reading it, but somewhere after the first few chapters, I decided I wasn’t ready for it so I shelved it. Then I thought I’d try it again so I put it up for the second time as the sole book for reading this December 2013 – only to fail again because there were just too many activities and stuff to do during the holidays.




But my failure to read that one particular book doesn’t mean I was unable to read any book at all. Here are the books that I did finish reading last month:

• The History of Love by Nicole Krauss – A life of loneliness. 4/5.

• Cover (Story) Girl by Chris Mariano – Mr. Museum and Miss Korean, beach love. 5/5.

• The Wolves In The Walls by Neil Gaiman – You know what they say when the wolves come out of the walls, right? 4/5.

• All I Want For Christmas by Chris Mariano, Chrissie Peria and Miles Tan – A (free) sweet love story for Christmas. 4/5.

So what is that book that seems to be a challenge to read?

Third time's a charm, right?

I am buddy-reading this with my sister Maria from the book club, and I hope that I will finally get into the groove of this one with someone reading along with me. We start Monday!