I had been looking for an easy Thursday blog meme ever since I became overwhelmed trying to piece together the occasional Thursday 13 post. I think I finally found a good one!
Time Travel Thursday is a weekly meme hosted by Budget Tales Book Blog where readers take a look back at what they were reading this time last year (or the year before or the year before that…) and compare it to what they are reading now.
Let's go back all the way to 2012, another leap year as it turns out and it so happens that on 29 February I finished Steve Berry's The Emperor's Tomb. It was the 13th book I had read so far that year. As we will see, that was one of my better starts to a Goodreads Reading Challenge (which is the source of my bookish history). In 2012, I stopped recording my progress in that year's challenge with the 36th book -- finished on 15 August.
On this date the following year, I had finished only my fourth book of 2013 -- the English language version of Growing Stronger, a memoir of Mexican singer Thalía. That year, I again stopped recording my progress in Goodreads at the end of August with the 37th book of the year (the second installment of Lawrence Block's Matthew Scudder series, Time to Murder and Create). I really do not recall what happened but I didn't record anything else in the Goodreads app until January 1, 2018, when I finished reading a James Rollins thriller. Unfortunately, that was the only entry for the entire year and I skilled 2019 altogether. I certainly was reading during these periods of time, I just didn't feel compelled to list the details for posterity.
In 2020, I pledged to finish 50 books in the challenge and reached that goal on 30 December. I read most of those during the several lockdowns we had in Phuket that year during the COVID-19 pandemic and had finished my fifth book -- The Best American Mystery Stories 2019 -- on Valentine's Day. Book number 6 would be finished on 3 March, A Minute to Midnight by David Baldacci . This was the second in the Atlee Pine series; I finished the fourth (and final) book one month ago today.
On 27 February 2021, I finished reading Cockroaches by Jo Nesbø, the second in the Norwegian author's Harry Hole series. It is largely set in Bangkok and was my seventh of 46 books read that year. On the same date in 2022, I closed Clair Huffaker's The Cowboy and the Cossack for the last time, a fascinating tale of an 1880 cattle drive by American cowboys to a famine-stricken town in Siberia. Huffaker has written additional Westerns but I had yet to read any others. As I was working much more that year, I only pledged to finish 25 books and didn't even hit that number (completing just 20).
Last year, I again pledged 25 books in the Goodreads Reading Challenge. I had fallen off a more than 10 year reading streak at one point and it had curbed my enthusiasm for quite some time. However, about mid-year 2023 I began devoting this blog more to reading than to other endeavors and the amount of reading I did in my spare time increased to the point that I hit 25 books sometime in July and finished with 50. But it was a slow start as I had only read five books by February 21 (Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch by Sally Bedell Smith) and wouldn't finish another book until the 12th of March.
For 2024, I pledged 98 books. I am off to an excellent start -- even better than 2013. Last night, I finished reading When the Devil Doesn't Show by Christine Barber, my 16th of the year. It's set in New Mexico which -- even after nearly 20 years in Thailand -- is still my favorite of all the places I have lived and my favorite region to read about.
In looking back over the books I read during each of the years mentioned above, I continue to read many of the same authors and a more or less similar balance of fiction and non-fiction. The topics of the non-fiction works remain rooted in history with the occasional biography (musicians and royalty dominating) but there has been a shift over the last two or three years towards natural history as well.
New during the latter part of 2023 and continuing so far this year, I have found motivational works such as The Daily Stoic to hold my fascination at a degree I would have scoffed at a decade ago. I suppose that I am starting to read such works as a (too) brief respite from all the bad news circulating these days. I need bright lights in my life, not dark tunnels.
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