January Wrap Up

My first wrap up post! In these I will be going through what I’ve read in a month and reviewing how my reading challenges are going. I’ll also highlight the books I’ve enjoyed, which might be everything, depending on how the month has gone!

Books read:

• The Paladin Caper – Patrick Weekes —> this is one I carried over from December and finished at the beginning of the month.
• Advanced Triggernometry – Stark Holborn
• Before The Coffee Gets Cold – Toshikazu Kawaguchi
• The Untold Story – Genevieve Cogman
• A Marvellous Light – Freya Markse
• Seven Devils – Laura Lam & Elizabeth May —> this was a re-read ahead of reading Seven Mercies
• Seven Mercies – Laura Lam & Elizabeth May

All of the books I read in January were 4 starts or above, which I will take as a sign of a good reading month! My 2 standouts though were A Marvellous Light and Seven Mercies (I was taken aback by the end of that book and I may have teared up a bit)

Goodreads / Storygraph reading challenges:

For 2022, I’ve set both my Goodreads and Storygraph reading challenges to 50 books. It’s a fairly small target, but one I know from experience is usually achievable. I managed to get through 7 books (including a re-read) and if I can keep this up, I’ll probably look at either increasing my target or seeing how far I can surpass it.

I’m also doing the Hodderscape 2022 Reading Challenge over on Storygraph – 12 prompts (plus some bonus ones), 12 books. I managed to make some progress with that as well, reading 2 books for that challenge. Again, if I could keep up that momentum, I would probably finish the challenge fairly quickly, but most of the books I’ve added don’t come out until later this year, so I’ll just have to be patient! (If anyone is interested, I’ll do a post with my TBR for that challenge).

Other things:

I’ve also set myself a couple of other reading goals for this year:

1. Read at least 2 books from my Kindle backlog
2. Read at least 1 new author a month

Given that I have far too many unread books on my Kindle, I thought I’d start whittling that backlog down this year.

For the second goal, this was something I did a few years ago and it worked really well. I discovered new authors and read outside of SFF, which was one of the main reasons I did it. Since I want to read more outside of SFF this year, I thought it was a good time to bring this back.

In January, I managed to read 4 books, which I’m very happy about and I read 2 new authors, so these goals are off to a good start!

All in all, January was a really good reading month for me. I hope February will be just as good!