In 2018 I decided it was time to do a little something for me. After about eighteen years of homeschooling I found myself burnt out on reading for my work as a homeschool mother. Pre-reading things for the children, reading homeschool philosophy books, reading to better understand my faith - all good and worthy but it was not feeding me, a lifelong lover of mysteries and other genres of fiction, I wanted to really enjoy reading again and not find it a chore.
Toward that end in January of 2018 I joined GoodReads (follow me there) and set a reading challenge of fifty books to read that year. I was unsure I could accomplish this given how busy I was and how inclined I was to nod off reading at night but I am a very fast reader and I thought fifty was a reasonable number to try for. I hit sixty-one that year.
I was so happy that I challenged myself this way. It wasn’t about the number so much as widening my life to include that which had been so much a part of me before having children. When we married and I moved into our apartment my husband was astonished, I mean utterly floored, by how many books I brought with me. I’m a reader and I was back.
Early in the year I read the book I'd Rather Be Reading: The Delights and Dilemmas of the Reading Life by Anne Bogel and it opened my eyes to a world of fiction I probably would never have tried. I am really grateful I picked up that book because I was the kind of reader that stuck exclusively to the types of books I had always read and I rarely dipped out into anything new. Anne Bogel’s book made so many stories sound intriguing that I fired up the library app and started placing holds.
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