Reading in Reykjavík

It's that time of the year again: Time to look back over the year that just ended, to give thanks for all the great books I read in 2013, bemoan all the potentially great books I planned to read but didn't and express regrets for the books I read that were not so good. However, I have come to the conclusion that one shouldn't have regrets about books not read and books read but not enjoyed. After all, the unread books might, once you actually read them, turn out to be crap, and the only way to find out that you don't like a book is to read it, so the time spent reading the "bad" books isn't really wasted time but rather invested. It's just that the time you invested in the books you didn't like hasn't paid dividends like the time you invested in the good, great and excellent books. Therefore I will not spend time discussing the negative points of my reading year but will let my comments in the monthly reading reports suffice. As for the gr...

Happy New Year! I read 155 books in 2012, which was about the same as in a normal reading year. I finished two reading challenges, the always entertaining What's in a Name challenge, which I may repeat this year, and a personal challenge of finishing 50 books from my own library that I had not read before. The second challenge started out as a means to reduce the TBR part of my library below 600 books. Then I got around 20 books from my grandfather when he cut down his library in preparation for moving into a serviced apartment, and inherited nearly 90 books from my grandmother. Naturally, this upset the original challenge. This influx of books caused me to give up on the original goal and I decided to concentrate on finishing a certain number of TBR books rather than reducing the library down to a particular number. The books that stood out for me in 2012 were wildly different from each other: Just Kids by Patti Smith is an honest portrait of the relationship/friends...

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...