Hello, my friends. I have just returned from the long Christmas vacation that I thoroughly enjoyed. It was wonderful to spend time with my parents and it allowed me some time to heal physically and emotionally after a very long and stressful fall semester. It was not, however, a season of intense reading. I finished up a single volume while I was away. It wasn’t exactly what I had planned for the holiday, but it was exactly what I needed.
Now that I have returned to Plainview, I was able to plug the final details into my reading tracker in order to get a good view of how the year turned out for this reader. I read 39 books in 2020 — just one short of my goal! To put that fact another way, I read 14,053 pages of written text in the past 12 months for pure pleasure. That’s a number that I can live with, but I would certainly like to see if I can push it up to 15,000 in the year ahead.
2020 was dominated by two series. The largest and most impactful was Jeffrey Archer’s The Clifton Chronicles. I started the series in April as the pandemic and the stay-at-home orders began to reach their height here in west Texas. Fittingly, the seventh book of the saga was the final book I read in 2020. In the midst of all of reading this family saga, I also found myself drawn to Karen Kingsbury’s 9-11 series. The three books in this set spoke to my spirit in times when I felt spiritually alone and hopeless. The stories were each gripping and brought me to tears as I shared the characters’ pain, loss, challenges, victories, and healings. I’ve not traditionally been a fan of Christian fiction, but these were the perfect books to read in this season of life.
I was very lucky that I didn’t encounter too many duds in my reading this year. There were two novels, however, that were quite simply exceptional and stood out from all the rest. Both were by the same author as well — Kristin Hannah. The Great Alone and On Mystic Lake were stories that I will not soon forget and made the reading journey so incredibly enjoyable. I’m looking forward to the release of Hannah’s newest novel in February, 2021. If you have not already discovered this powerful voice, I encourage you to grab a copy of either of these novels (or The Nightingale) right away.
Do I plan to make some changes to my reading in 2021? First, I hope to hit the 40 book mark this year. I was also struck by how little middle grade fiction I read this year. I’ve long enjoyed works written for this age group, but simply neglected it this year — only reading 2 young adult novels. I plan to increase that number to at least 6 in 2021. On this flip side, I was impressed with the number of non-fiction works that found their way into my reading life this year. I read 10 — mostly personal memoirs of celebrities and largely as audio books. In 2021, I would like to see the quality of the non-fiction that I read improve. The quantity is fine….but I can do better than reading about the cast of Queer Eye. I just have to push myself to do better.
Reading for Me 
Leave a comment