Books books books

Good morning and happy New Year!

I stayed dizzy most of yesterday. That was not a good deal of fun. But! I woke up this morning a great deal less dizzy. And timprov had been cleaning in here, and markgritter had cleaned both upstairs bathrooms, and there was fresh snow on the ground, and eventually the sky turned a bright blue. So happy New Year to me.

It seems like every Christmas holiday should contain a day wherein I do very little but read. Yesterday was that day. And while I'm at it, here are ( the books I read in late December, with diversion on writers and reading )

I decided not to include the books I didn't finish reading. Executive decision etc.

For the year:
Number of books read: 232
By Category: "Mainstream" fiction: 20
Graphic novels: 2
Children's/YA: 46
Mystery: 64
Nonfiction: 54
Poetry: 2
Speculative Fiction: 104

In my record keeping, I do not play the game where you decide whether the FTL drive is sufficiently scientific to make a space opera SF or whether it is sufficiently magical to make it fantasy. It's all spec fic in my books log. Most of it would divide, but I just don't feel like it.

I will also note that while the library is gaining on him, dd_b remains the major source of books-not-owned-by-us on my reading list, with 60 out of 232 books read this year borrowed from him. Other notable friendslist lenders included krittersjournal and porphyrin.

Irresolute

So here's the thing about me and New Year's Resolutions: I don't make 'em. I am an experimentalist by nature and by training, so if there's something I want to change, I try changing it more or less right away, and I evaluate how it goes from there. For awhile I would declare any such change a "New Year's Resolution" regardless of what day of the year it was made. That was silly, and I quit. But I still change things when it occurs to me to do so, and I'm not really short on self-critical introspection much of the time.

The other thing is, very few of my goals are year-long goals. Some of them are day-long, some week-long, some seasonal, some "if I die trying."

I do keep a separate spreadsheet for fiction submissions for each calendar year, or it would get pretty unwieldy, and I confess that I freaked out when I removed all the sold and trunked stories from 2006 ("Ack! Need to write more stories!"), but I'd been having that particular freakout on a fairly regular basis for the last half of the year, so I'll just return to the file in front of me right now and add some words to that. One foot in front of the other. Etc.