Reading in Reykjavík

Happy New Reading Year! May your year be filled with good friendship, good cheer and good reading! I ended the year 2009 with four reading challenges on the go: the Top Mysteries challenge, the TBR challenge, the challenge to read more Icelandic books, and a fourth challenge I'm not sure I have ever mentioned here. The Top Mysteries challenge is an ongoing project that is probably going to take me until 2012 to finish, so it will continue this year. I started with 120 books (counting one trilogy as a single book) and ended with 89, meaning I finished 26% of the listed books. This puts me right on plan, as I had hoped to reach that percentage by the end of the year. The TBR challenge will continue as well. To recap the rules: it is a challenge to read more books than I buy, choosing books that have languished in my TBR stack for over a year. I failed in that aim in 2009, ending up with more TBR books than ever, mostly due to BookMooch. But I am not giving up, and this y...

I have two this year: No. 1 is to finish the 52 mystery authors challenge before the end of the year. This should be easy, and in fact I would have finished it before the end of last year if I had not got that big translation job. No. 2 is to read at least one classic per month. For the purpose of the resolution, I am defining a classic as any novel or non-fiction book written before 1900 that is still in print and generally considered to be deserving of being called a classic.