A Month of Faves-- Reading Challenges and Goals/How I Read and Blogged

A Month of Faves is hosted by Girlxoxo, Traveling With T, and Estella's Revenge.

I have a hard time signing up for long-term reading challenges. I forget what I'm doing. I do better with small challenges during seasonal times of the year. I participated in all the Halloween reading challenges and aced those like a champ. I'm also apart of the Classics Club but I didn't not get my ten in this year. :(

I always have a goal to do what I can in Read Harder challenges by Book Riot but once again I just have a hard time sticking to a certain theme each month.

I read a book a day in September with Stacy from Stacy's Book Blog. That was fun and hard and really enjoyable. Most of the books I read were children's books and very short non-fiction. But I read a lot of things that had been on my list!

I always have a goal to read more diverse books and try new genres. 34/128 of my books read this year were by diverse authors. Not as good as I would have liked but 2019 is a new year to do better.

44/128 were male authors so the majority of my reading this last year was definitely female-centric.

21 books were young adult. 28 were children and juvenile fiction. 50 were non-fiction. 23 were memoirs/biographies. I read a lot of mini history bio collections and true crime books. I managed to get one philosophy book in too. Most of my non-fiction this year was memoir. I usually try for more history and science in my non-fiction. I guess I needed something a bit different this year. It seems like I needed to connect with human stories more than anything else. We shall see what 2019 brings!

18 Audiobooks.

25 books were either sci-fi or fantasy! I usually don't read that much in those genres. I also read a lot of horror and mystery/crime fiction. 19 horror and 13 crime/mystery.

I loved listening to Tomi Adeyemi's Children of Blood and Bone. It's a beautiful story made even more magical while listening to it!

My favorite audiobook memoir was Eddie Izzard's Believe Me. He has little live notes that he just shoots from the hip while he made it. It was so funny and entertaining.

I noticed, according to Goodreads, that I read a lot more books that I actually enjoyed. I'm not sure if that means I intentionally picked up books I knew I'd love or if I just happened to find ones I loved more than another year but whichever it was, it was definitely a great reading year for me! 24 books were 5 stars for me and 64 were 4 stars! That's some funtastic books!

I know I can't sign up for any blogging challenge and actually accomplish it. But I know I will keep my eye on The Read Harder challenge from Book Riot. And Girlxoxo has monthly blogging challenges that I may try to participate in as well. Michelle from True Book Addict always has seasonal reading challenges that are short enough to get me going. And I'm perpetually reading my Classics Club books. I also have a list of Amazon's 100 books to read in a lifetime. A list from Well-educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer. And President Obama always releases his best reads throughout the year and I try to keep my eye on those for reading ideas.

I've blogged a lot more this year than I did last year and it's been great. To date I've written 117 blog posts this year! Whoa! My favorites are probably the self-reflective ones I've done in December. I've stretched a bit thinking about my year of reading and living and I've seen some patterns.

I've found new bloggers to follow and participated in blogging events and small reading challenges and it's been good for me. I'd like to keep it up and make it more regular. I need the practice I really do enjoy it. So many of my TBR lists comes from fellow book bloggers! Plus I get ideas on how to change things up and to look back at my reading year and see how far I've come and where to go next!