A Reboot of Sorts

Hi internet. Since the last time I posted on this blog, some things have happened. Specifically, the thing that I had been afraid of (and had started this whole reading project in response to) actually happened. And as it turns out, I'm very bad at focusing on unknown narratives when it feels like the real world is collapsing around me, so I spent five weeks mostly rereading Dunnett and classic fics from fandoms that felt like they would never hurt me.

I am probably going to need to retreat to old fandom favorites a lot in the foreseeable future, and I'm definitely planning on spending a lot of the Christmas seasons rereading my favorite Merlin and Harry Potter holiday fics, along with the annual Yuletide bounty. But this past week, I also wanted to read a bunch of Christmas romance novels, and so I did, and that reminded me that as much as I want to keep diving into fic for narrative comfort, I also want to read new stories about new characters, too. And I don't want to track my reading in exactly the way I did for most of this year, not least because at the moment I don't have the same kind of naive faith that at some point in the future Everything Will Be Okay if I can just distract myself until we get to some arbitrary date. Which I think is actually a good thing, overall, and not because I'm now convinced that the future holds nothing but pain and suffering and everything is pointless. It's more that life has always been some level of bad, and it will continue to be some level of bad, and the only thing I can do is work for the things I believe in with my time and money and energy, while also enjoying the things I love and making life at least a bit better for the people in my life, to the best of my ability. And part of that is reading books and learning and discovering new things, because for me that's one of the best parts of being alive. I don't want to try to use reading as a means of counting down to a potential moment in the future again; I just want to focus more on doing what I can each individual day, and less on what might or might not happen later, for better or for worse.

Having said all that, another thing that I love is having a goal, and I also really love numbers and tracking things. So I am maintaining one key aspect of this blog: I'm still keeping track of how many books I'm reading, and I still have an overall goal -- two, actually. The first goal is to read 100 books by the end of 2016, and my second goal is to read 104 books in 2017 and to be all caught up with books I own by that point as well. I currently have 48 books left on my to-read list, and I'll probably get at least 4 books as Christmas presents, which means that in 2017 I can also buy a new book a week and still potentially reach both the 104 books read goal and be completely caught up by 2017. And an average of 2 new books a week is both far more reasonable in general and also means that I'll have enough time to reread old favorites when I want to. This plan also makes it easier to dive into reading some of my remaining 48 books that are the start of series, because now if I read the first book and am then desperate to read the next one, I can without feeling like I'm messing up the plan by adding new books to the list!!! Most importantly, I feel excited about reading again, and like I have a project that's just about doing a thing I love. 

So! I've read five Christmas novels/novellas/short stories this week, and posts about them will go up later today. I have enough time off over the next two weeks that I should be able to read eight more books by the end of 2016, and then I can start 2017 with a much more reasonable goal of reading two books per week. Here we go.