UPDATE: AND THE WINNER IS...


With a few months left to go in 2015, I am very happy that I have already completed my 2015 Reading Challenge on Goodreads. Most people probably won't be impressed that I only had a goal of twenty books (especially those who can read that many in 1-2 months), but for me that seemed like a rather daunting challenge. See, I've had sort of a sour taste for reading for a long time. This is largely because of large quantities of required, academic reading. While I won't go into a deeper criticism of the education system, I will say that school, both at High School and University levels really killed my passion for reading. I'd come to think of reading as a sort of chore or burden and that's something I wanted to try and overcome.

Having recently struggled with a bit of a reading slump, I think I may have had a bit of a relapse in this mentality, but I pulled through and can now happily state that my goal has been met and I can look forward to pushing myself to see how many I can read by year's end.

In a previous post I discussed my four current reads and that I wasn't sure which one would make it as my twentieth both, thereby being the book that completed the challenge. While I have actually finished three out of the four mentioned, the winner of this contest of whim is Brooding City by Tom Shutt. The review for which is now up on this blog. I was really happy to wrap up the challenge with this one since it is an indie book and a rather good one at that.



It's been a really fantastic year of reading so far and there have been some really good books that I've read so far. The highlights for me (books I gave five star ratings to) have been:












The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins







Already I have also finished Grim's Fairy Stories which will be getting a book talk very soon and Unstable Prototypes (Big Sigma Book 2) which I will be reviewing shortly. I also mowed through Haruki Murukami's The Strange Library (one of the BookTubeSFF Award nominees) so I have that on the review-writing backlog as well. Unfortunately, I do have one spill-over from August, that being Andy Wier's The Martian. I just finished that one up today so hopefully I can get to writing that review without much delay. Then I may be reading "Meeker and the All Seeing Eye" (another BookTubeSFF nominee). I've already bought the Stone Giant and have the audio file so I think that will be my next audiobook, then I'd like to wrap up The Hunger Games trilogy, get to a couple other books I already have paperbacks for and eventually buy the next installment in Kristoff's Lotus War trilogy.

In short, its been a great challenge to complete with 5 out of 20 being books that I now count among my favorites and not a single book being something I rated at less than a 3. It's been a good mix of indie, small press, and mainstream literature and I am grateful for all the books I received for free either in exchange for an honest review or from a giveaway. I'm looking forward to enjoying even more books between now and the end of 2015.

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