This is a couple of weeks later than I ought to have put it up, but a lot of life has been happening, so I hope you can forgive me procrastinating this a smidge. I still want to get it up regardless, though, so it’s time to see where I’m at with my challenges with the year now half over.

Right off the bat, I’m not really where I want to be. Having been doing freelance editing work for almost a year now, I think it is safe to say it has a significant impact on my reading progress. I will have to re-evaluate my goals in the future, presuming that I continue to do this job long term, which I would like to do, but you never know what the future might hold.

Goodreads Challenge

At the moment, I’m still at a slightly uncomfortable eight books behind schedule. I chose 50 books to read this year, which I hoped would be more attainable, but I suppose I did not fully appreciate the long-term effects of my new working situation. In my last update, I had only finished nine books; now, I’m sitting with 19 completed. Of these, seven have been books/novels, 10 have been comics, one has been a poetry collection, and another an art book. I did a slightly better job of cracking open comic books, at least, and I’m hoping to do that more in the near future. I’m mad at how Amazon butchered Comixology and haven’t touched my digital collection since that happened, but I have plenty to physical comics that need reading.

Scrappy To-Read List

Every year I like to assemble a hand-written list of books to read, all for the thrill of crossing them out as I complete them. As with last year, it’s a list of 12 books that must come from series I haven’t started before. They can begin a series, but no sequels, spin-offs, or anything like that.

As it stands, here is the list:

As you can see, since my last update, I have only completed two more books on this list, which were Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel and Son of a Trickster by Eden Robinson.

So, I’ve done a little better since my last update, but I need to pick up the pace all the same. With that in mind, I’ve actually been focusing my energy primarily on this list. I’m hoping that if all else fails, I can at least get this done. If I spread myself too thin, trying to make progress in all challenges, I imagine I won’t end up completing any of them. You take what victories you can, though obviously I’ve still got my work cut out for me, as I’ve only completed a quarter of what I need to with less than six months left in the year.

Series Challenge

On top of those two main challenges, I’ve still got these two smaller sub-challenges that I want to complete so that I can stay on top of the series I’ve already started. The first quartet of books is for the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett.

As you can see, I’ve unfortunately not made any progress with these. Like I said above, I’ve allowed this to go on the back burner while I focus on my scrappy list. If I make a good dent in that, I will redirect some focus here.

The other quartet of books just includes an assortment of entries from series I want to stay on top of.

As you can see, I’ve also not made a further dent in these either. I’m actually especially interested in reading all of the books included here though, so I’m hoping I can make time for at least one or two more, if not all of them.

Writing

For a long time now I’ve not had very much to say on this front, and that hasn’t really changed, except for the fact that I was hit with a bout of inspiration recently and wrote a bunch of thoughts down in a notepad file. It’s not much, but it helped put into perspective the way I want to approach some ideas in that fantasy novel I’ve been ruminating on for over a decade. It’s actually a fairly foundational shift in how I’m looking at things, so I’m pretty enthused about expanding upon it in the future, whenever that may be.

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How are your reading challenges going? I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

Until next time, thank you for reading!