A Good Year for Books

It was a good year for books. Book writing, book publishing…book reading. Thanks to the incentive of the Goodreads 2014 Reading Challenge, I read 32 book this past year — the highest total I can recall since my days as a tome-weary English major!

Apparently, I am not alone…in 2014, the Goodreads Reading Challenge had 678,678 participants with over 18,898,565 books read. If even half of those were tactile, printed books, my old-school heart can rest easy for another year.

Looking back over my own list of Books Read for the year, it’s hard to call out just one as a favorite. Apparently, I read a great number by Alice Hoffman, eight in total. Of those, I would most certainly share the dog-earred Green Heart, The Museum of Extraordinary Things and The Dovekeepers.

Other favorites included The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka, The Gravity of Birds by Tracy Guzeman, and Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton.

My goal of reading more from poets paid off — Adrienne Rich, Hafiz, Mary Oliver, Billy Collins — as did my goal of reading more books in general. Happily.

I am still wandering through The Paris Wife by Paula McLain and falling in love with the time period — Paris in the twenties — and Ernest Hemingway, of all people (and all writers). Will it inspire a detour from this year’s magic realism? We’ll see…

Where ever the new year takes me, I’ll be signing up for the next Goodreads Reading Challenge. Will you?

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