A Look Back on My Reading in January 2012

I've got this big goal to read a whole bunch of books in 2012 and I think I did a pretty good job getting ahead of the curve in the month of January. Overall I finished seven books, which averages out to just a bit under two per week, which is good by any definition.

Granted, some of the books were of the slightly shorter variety being from authors who are fairly new or from a series where the books aren't that long, but the others were of above-average length, so in the end I think it evened out pretty well.

The final tally is five science fiction or fantasy books, and two popular fiction books. Not too bad I think coming from someone who doesn't read much popular fiction. If I could down one or two popular fiction books each month until the end of the year I would feel pretty good about things.

I was curious, so I spent a few minutes on Amazon looking up page counts for the books I did read since I read them all on my Kindle and don't have that sort of information readily available. It turns out that I read the equivalent of 2,205 pages, or an average of 71 pages per day. That's kind of cool. In more abstract terms I like to think of it as having read two Wheel of Time books, which is pretty impressive in its own right.

So what is on tap for February? Do I think I'll get another seven books finished? Well, I don't think I'll get seven more finished in February, but I should get at least two or three. Right now I'm about a third of the way through the final book of the Millenium series, which I think will only take me another day or two, but then, well... then I get to start Atlas Shrugged, and I have a feeling it's going to take me at least a week or two which means I might sneak in another book (if it's short), maybe two right at the end of the month, but no promises on that front.

Right now I'm trying to stay ahead of my "one per week" idea so I can indulge in a couple of really long books later in the year such as a re-read of Brandon Sanderson's The Way of the Kings and the final Wheel of Time book due out sometime late this fall. So far so good, but we'll see if I can keep up in the coming months.