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.

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.

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.

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.