Wow! Best reading year ever! I started with setting my goal to 50, but ending up challenging myself to read 200 books. I didn't make it to 200, but I read 192 works including the King James Bible! I'm shamelessly impressed with myself. Now, I read a lot of fairy-tales which are often published as a single volume and I have listed these separately to keep track of which of the Hans Christian Andersen and Grimm Brother's stories I have read. I did read 94 "proper" books. I will not be able to repeat last year's high tide now that I am no longer a student and have -- seemingly -- joined the world of The Grown Ups tum, tum, tum, but I'll make an effort to read at least 25 books.
I've already recorded the titles of which I wrote a review in my List of Reviews.
Books read: |
192 |
Pages read: |
30,304 |
First book: |
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman (28 December 2012 - |
Last book: |
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling |
First sentence: |
The night before he went to London, Richard |
Last sentence: |
As Hagrid had said, what would come, would come ... |
Longest book: |
The King James Bible (3951 pages) |
Top shelves: |
Out of all I read in 2013, the highest ratings were for:
Looking at my top shelves, I could not get an accurate picture of what I read. Since roughly one hundred stories were those fairy-tales by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen (and a handful of Charles Perrault and Giambattista Basile) the top shelves are mostly for male author, German literature, Danish literature, children's literature, fairy-tales and 19th century literature. All these shelves are those on which I shelved the Andersen and Grimm fairy-tales.
This year, 2014, it's quality over quantity and, if possible, female authors over male. After reading AbeBook's Literary Review of 2013, I got very excited about all the great books that were written last year. Books I did not read then. And seeing the names of all those authors who died last year reminded me how much there is I still have not read. Some of the literary minds we lost last year were and whose works I want to read this year:
Now that I have finished my Harry Potter marathon, which I started in November after Litchick proposed to start a group read, I will pick up the Man Booker Prize, Pulitzer and Nobel Prize for Literature winners from 2013.
The rest of the year I hope to continue with other major award winners.