The Ongoing Planner: A Time To Read

Last year I read 47 books. My goal was to make it to 50, but I just didn't quite make it.

This year my goal was going to be 50 books again. I will theoretically have more time to read since I know I'll be taking light rail all year instead of only six months like this last year. And my job is less time-consuming. But I have a really big list of other things I want to do with my free time. I also realized that is about a book a week, which I think it a little bit too much since as of right now I don't plan on reading any young adult series and have a lot of classics on my list.

So my goal will be 40 books. I already have one down! Just finished Little Women. I had seen the movie when I was young, but it has been a really long time, so I didn't remember a whole lot about it.

Overall it was a good book, but a little too religious for me. It was a good "this is life" book without much action or adventure. Definitely strong character development and some great life lessons.

This year I plan to continue through the 100 Books to Read Before You Die list that my girlfriend and I are going through. We will be continuing our book club. I'll be meeting Thursday to discuss Woman In White and then we will also pick our next set of books. We pick four books at a time. We usually try to do a mix of modern and classic, but last time ended up with mostly classic type books. I am thinking of maybe choosing all women authors for this next set just to see how that goes.

As I mentioned, there are a lot of classics on the list and especially a lot of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. I have tried reading Pride & Prejudice several times and just can't get through the language (and I am pretty strong reader, personally), but there are like 4 Austen books, so I should probably get through at least one this year. I have only read Dickens' Great Expectations which I found to be a terrible book, but people say his other books are better, so we'll see, I'll probably try to tackle one of those this year as well.

I plan to update my Goodreads (if you haven't checked out Goodreads.com you should! Great for tracking the books you read and the books you want to read. If you are like me, I have had like 6 or so different lists of books floating around that I want to buy, so this helps consolidate it into one and there is an app for the iPhone too.) for this list so I can track my progress better.

The question is what do I want read next? Now that I have my Kindle, but I still have a couple "normal" books left, I find it hard to decide. I absolutely LOVE my Kindle! Even more than I thought I would. It is so easy to read with and so light, I can read with one hand. I think I'll stick with my Kindle for now and read my hard books when I don't want to bring my Kindle somewhere.