At the beginning of last year, I had just finished reading Stephen King’s On Writing, in which he, among other fascinating things, discusses how gargantuan of a reader he is. He said he read 80 books a year, easily, which I found mind-blowing.
I wanted to see how many books I could read this year. Thankfully, Goodreads has a Reading Challenge Widget, so this was easy (plus it reminded me to write a review after I read something).
I have a day job, a small business, a fiance and a small social life, in addition to any personal writing I want to get done, so King’s goal was stupidly out of reach. No, for me, I needed to lower that bar a little bit. So I picked a goal of 26 books, a book for every two weeks.
The other day, Goodreads let me know that I had met my goal! (Hey, Goodreads, the year isn’t actually over yet…?)
In 2013, I logged 27 books, and if I finish The Shipping News by the first, I’ll have 28 official books for the year. Of the 27 books logged in Goodreads, that is apparently 8,479 pages.
That’s pretty good! But it’s not actually the full picture. The Wool Omnibus would have otherwise counted as three novels (or novellas; I’m not sure how Goodreads makes that distinction). I also read two books for work that I didn’t log, because they were poorly written business aphorisms that I was forced to read and never want to acknowledge actually existed. Plus I read a sizable stack of comic books (Star Wars, four issues of the Avatar comic, and Saga. Go read Saga. It’s amazing.) and I felt like it was weird to log comic books because they are generally only 12 pages long (I finally included Saga in my reviews, sort of, after I had read the whole first collection, making it sort of book-length.)
That means, without changing my habits at all, I read about 35 books in a year (and that includes some stupidly thick books like Leviathan Wakes and The Forgotten Garden. Don’t read those if you’re going for a speed challenge, kids).
35 books a year? Not too shabby!
I really enjoyed logging my books. It’s a good way to reflect on what I’ve read and what it means to me, so I’ll definitely be participating in the reading challenge for next year. Let’s clock it at officially 30 books this year.
Will you join my reading challenge? How many books would you like to read in 2014?
M.E. Kinkade 
All of them. That’s my answer.
I blogged about my failure to read as many as I wanted. I would have had more books this year if I counted comic books. I suspect that I will read more on the east coast. I’m glad you were able to meet your goals!
If you had to choose though, and I mean you have to choose, which was your FAVORITE book and which one was the BEST book you read.
“Saga” collectively is the best, I’d say, but those are currently only trade comics so that may not count.
Favorite is tough: I read a lot of really good ones! Maybe “Leviathan Wakes,” because it was so rich and unexpected.
I think you would really enjoy “Quiet.” It’s high-quality nonfiction.