Books - Halfway Through the Year

Inspired by Deb's 2006 Reading List post at the beginning of this year, I tried to cobble together a list of books I'd read last year only to discover I hadn't kept track very well. So I made some reading resolutions for this year. My resolutions included keeping a good record and reading at least one book a week. I'd planned on doing an update post on my reading list so far for the year on a quarterly basis, but time slipped away from me a bit. So, it's been a bit over three months since my last report. Not halfway through the year but "half-ish".

If you want to see what I read in the first quarter of the year, you can go here.

Books I've read since then are:

April
Murder in the Marais by Cara Black
Killed by Clutter by Leslie Caine
Summer Knight by Jim Butcher
Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman
Renaissance Soul by Margaret Lobenstine

May
Murder in Belleville by Cara Black
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince by J K Rowling

June
Death Masks by Jim Butcher
Le Mariage by Diane Johnson

July
Dead End Dating by Kimberly Raye
Murder with Peacocks by donna Andrew
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J K Rowling

August
Into the Green by Charles DeLint
Stardust by Neil Gaiman (still reading it)

I did the math and this weekend will be the end of the 32nd week of the year and I'm in the middle of my 33rd book of the year. Right on target. I'm mostly pleased with that, because I thought I had fallen behind my book-a-week goal, but I'm a bit disappointed as well because in the first three months of the year I'd managed to get ahead of schedule and over the summer my reading schedule suffered so much that I've "fallen back" to being on schedule. It's all that travel and enjoying my family and gardening and reorganizing my life stuff that's been getting in the way. Hmmm. Guess no one is gonna listen to me whine about those excuses.

Despite years of evidence to the contrary, I still cling insanely to the idea of summer time as an opportunity to swing in a hammock with a neverending supply of iced tea and good books. The fact that this hasn't been true for years - since I was about fourteen years old actually - doesn't sway me from my belief. Despite my best efforts and cheerful denial of reality however, I always seem to have far less reading time in the summer. I even knew, with my mind's boggling ability to hold two separate and opposite truths to be true simultaneously, that I wouldn't have as much time to read this particular summer. Hopefully when the days shorten and the nights grow cold once more, my extra reading time will return (again - not sure where I get the idea this will come about, but I like to pretend that it will be true).

It's turned out that this has been a year of series reading. I reread the Harry Potter series and have discovered and been enjoying some new (to me) series by Shirley Damsgaard, Cara Black, Jim Butcher, and Donna Andrews. (Thanks again to Diana for turning me on to Andrews hilarious mysteries.)

It's also been a year of trying to get in under a deadline to read a book, usually a book I'd already planned to read but hadn't gotten around to, before the story came out in movie form. I always want to read the book before I see the movie. Even though I'd read them before, the Harry Potter books kind of falls under this category, as I reread them to refresh my memory before the fifth book came out in movie form and the seventh book was published. Also Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series - it came out as a television show (which I love, by the way), and Gaiman's Stardust (which comes out in two days and is the movie that was being filmed in the Cotswold village of Castle Combe the day we visited there). I also want to reread at least the first of Philip Pullman's His Dark Material stories, The Golden Compass, before it comes out in theatres this November.

Between trying to beat the calendar to movie premieres and working my way through my favorite new series, I haven't diversified much in the last few months, which was one of my other reading goals for the year. But I'm enjoying what I'm reading, so I'm satisfied with my choices. It's my resolutions, I can be flexible.

If I could, I'd find more time to read more titles but since I have yet to be given a Time-Turner Pendant like Hermione received so she could do double studies one year at Hogwarts, more reading time would have to come with the sacrifice of something else I also want to do - like painting or traveling or kissing grandchildren or sleeping. So, for now, my reading speed will have to do.