Kudz

Same. I do have a four day weekend and want to get my reading year off to a good start too so I may stay up a little later than normal to get some additional pages read. Don't think I'll be up till midnight though; I'm an early to bed, early to rise person and going to bed at midnight would catch up with me at some point.

Thanks for the info, will definitely check it out.

I'm the same in many ways, although I am not quite as obsessed with this as I used to be. These days I don't mind general wear and tear on books, including broken or creased spines, but I wouldn't deliberately break the spine or damage the pages on purpose.

Is that the one you have to pay for though? It wouldn't normally be an issue but I don't really want to have to pay for something that other sites offer for free, particularly if I'm not going to be using the full features/functionality it offers.

I have never, and will never, annotate books. There are a few booktubers who I either watch, or have watched in the past, who annotate them to an extreme and I find it quite horrifying to watch. They highlight passages, underline sentences, write comments in the margins and although I am very much a case of ‘each to their own’ and ‘you do you’ I could never actually do it myself. It seems sacrilegious to me. In my opinion this is a much more acceptable way of doing it.

Has anyone been using The Story Graph on a regular basis? I was considering giving Goodreads another go for next year but have heard really good things about The Story Graph and was wondering if any members on here use it and whether they could give me an honest opinion about it. From what I have heard I believe they are very big on stats, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I’m personally not interested in that side of things so I’m thinking it may be wasted on me. I would like to be able to just log that I have read a book – no star rating, no review – so I'm thinking I may be best sticking to Goodreads. Any ideas?

Just realised that I hadn’t voted or replied to this topic. I am 41. Not too happy about the age bracket I had to tick though – I should have voted when I first joined and then I would have been in the bracket below. Nice to see the wide age range of members that we've had on here over the years, shame a lot of them aren’t here anymore though!

I’m back at work tomorrow after the Christmas break and I’m not looking forward to it at all. I have a feeling a couple of my colleagues will be phoning in sick, meaning I may have to work extra hours, which will just suck! Still, I do have another 4-day weekend coming up so I shouldn’t really complain. I also have absolutely no plans for it which means come Saturday I can curl up and hibernate for a few days; hoping to get lots of reading done. Regarding my plans for today; not much to be honest. I have a couple of things I need to do online regarding a book club I am hosting next year with a couple of IRL friends, but other than that I’m going to be taking it easy today. I might even try and squeeze in a couple more Christmas movies.

We had a little bit of snow fall yesterday which is still hanging about today. I’m not really up to date yet on where everyone is from/living but I hope all our American and Canadian members are all okay and haven’t been hit too hard with the winter storm that’s hit large parts of the country recently. Has anyone been affected by it? And, if so, do you have any photos?

Merry Christmas everyone. I hope you all have a wonderful day.

It’s fiction, the second book in a series and has a ‘celebrity’ author who does look like the man in the picture.

So apparently even though we have spent the past 10 days or so way below freezing it’s forecast to be about 11 degrees tomorrow! Weird weather!

Kindles are great for saving shelf space and I have hundreds of books on my Kindle but have stopped buying books for it – I think I’ve spoken about this on another thread so won’t go into my reasons why again here – but suffice to say I much prefer reading books with an actual physical copy rather than reading them on a screen. I don't have anything against e-readers in general, it's just my personal preference that’s all. They are a great idea though, they're just not for me.

I’m currently working my way through the Dr Ruth Galloway series by Elly Griffith and the main character is always putting not only herself, but her daughter, in dangerous situations and it drives me completely mad. It is so frustrating. I think the only reason I’m continuing with the series is because they are quick and easy reads. Plus, I do have to admit to being a little intrigued to know what happens with some of the characters plot points but overall, I have found the series very underwhelming, particularly when I have heard such good things about them.

Yeah, I’ve just watched one of my neighbours slip and slide her way to her car. I’m feeling quite smug that I don’t need to leave the house today.

I was always going to post my own but was waiting for someone else to post so I wasn’t double posting. I’ve debated over the last few weeks as to what my plans are for next year and have decided that I’m going to have a much more relaxed year of reading and not set any specific number-related goals. I’m not going to worry about how many books I read or how many pages I read a day; I’m not even going to keep track of overall page count which is something that I usually do track. My main goal for this year is to get my own physical TBR down as much as possible before buying any more. Now I know book buying bans don’t work, I have tried them several times in the past, and have always failed spectacularly at them, so this year I’m doing things slightly differently. I briefly mentioned this in another thread but I’m going to participate in The Unread Shelf Project*, whereby I am going to try and read exclusively, or certainly predominately, from my own shelves. For each book I read I am going to put 50p in a book jar, and a further 50p if I unhaul that book. So, each book I read from my shelf has the potential of earning me £1 – which admittedly doesn’t sound very much but I didn’t want to make it too easy on myself; I wanted it to be a bit of a challenge, as the money in the book jar is the ONLY money I am allowed to spend on books throughout 2023, so it's up to me whether I spend it as I earn enough to purchase a book, or whether I save it up and spend it in a book buying spree towards the end of the year. I am, however, going to continue to use and support my local library but I am going to try and limit myself on how many reservations I make, and not go too crazy. I’m going to be doing something similar. I have a habit of binge reading authors or genres, so this year I do want to mix things up a bit and alternate them all. I’m actually considering only reading one book per author a month, but we’ll see. * The original Unread Shelf Project idea was started several years ago and details can be found here. I have taken the initial basic idea, along with the title, and have amended it to suit my own needs.

With the year coming to a close I thought it would be interesting to discuss what our reading goals for next year are. Are you setting a goal of how many books you would like to read throughout the course of the year? Or maybe you prefer setting a number of pages as your goal? Are you concentrating on finishing off all those pesky series that you are in the middle of? Utilising the library more? Reading more classics? Or maybe you are going to have a much more relaxed reading year and not set yourself any goals at all? So, what are your reading plans for next year? Also, if you have had any goals for this year, please free to let us know what they were and whether you managed to achieve them or not.

We’ve got heavy snow forecast for today, and yet so far not so much as a flake has fallen. In fact, it’s been drizzling with rain all morning and it’s a couple of degrees above freezing, so maybe we’re going to escape it completely.

Ah, okay. I know you’ve mentioned before that you work from home and then when you mentioned reading for work my nosiness (and slight jealously) got the better of me. Thanks for answering.

Can I ask what your job is? Apologies if it's mentioned elsewhere on the forum.

I’m currently watching Blue Bloods and have just finished season 1; really enjoying it so far. Even though they are currently on season 13 and so I have plenty of episodes to watch, I’m pacing myself and am only watching 1-2 episodes at a time.

I work within the NHS so am constantly being hit with germs…my father calls my place of work the germ factory. Usually, all our immune systems are pretty darn good but as we’ve all been protected so much over the last couple of years it’s a bit of a concern. We’ve already had a couple of people off this winter with bad bouts of flu which plays havoc with schedules etc. but what can you do? We all knew this was going to happen. Plus, we’re all having to deal with the increased price of energy, which means everyone’s avoiding putting the heating on as much as possible, which means they are more susceptible to bugs etc. particularly if they already suffer from a respiratory disease. It’s a lose-lose situation! The next few months are going to be tough for everyone.

Agree…it was bin day for me yesterday and it was not easy manoeuvring them through the snow, and we didn’t even have that much!

A lot of people within the book community are avoiding them and are trying to buy solely from independent bookstores as they are one of the reasons why a lot of bookstores are going out of business because they just cannot compete with Amazon’s prices. I guess the same could be said for all types of stores though, not just bookstores. However, Amazon are notorious for treating authors badly so again this seems to be a pretty big reason within the book community to try and avoid buying from them. On top of the above you also have issues such as tax avoidance and the fact that they apparently treat their staff poorly…plus of course there are the usual privacy concerns too.

Sorry, I haven’t been around for the last couple of weeks, work has been a nightmare! We are inundated with patients having strep throat/scarlet fever and respiratory illnesses and it has been getting more and more hectic from one day to the next. The joys of the first proper winter without masks; everyone’s immune system is shot to pieces and the bugs are winning! On a happier note, I am off work this week so am spending my days curled up under a blanket reading, listening to music and watching Christmas movies. Perfect. I am wanting to spend a little bit of time over the next couple of days working on The Unread Shelf Project which kicks off January 1st though so more on that later!