Book a Week Challenge Summary

Well the year of my book a week challenge has officially ended!  I have good and bad news to report.  My goal was to read 52 books in 52 weeks or essentially a book a week for a whole year.  I started out with a vengeance.  As a result of this challenge I finally got my Dekalb County library card and used our local library heavily during the course of the year.  This was a wonderful result of the challenge.  I love being able to request books online and then in a few weeks they show up at my branch ready for me check out and take home.  I also rediscovered my love of reading.  I grew up without cable and so reading has always been one of my favorite leisure activities.  For the first few years I worked I did not do a good job maintaining my reading habits and mainly read on vacations, holidays, and weekends.  This challenge really helped me get back into regular reading habits.  So that is the good news.

So you guessed it, next is the bad news.  I only achieved about half of my goal.  In 52 weeks I completed 28 books.  While this is still a major improvement on my reading habits from previous years I was disappointed that I didn’t reach my goal.  I could list a bunch of excuses but really it was just hard for me to focus on all the areas of improvement I set for myself.  If my reading was going well my exercising wasn’t or if my healthy eating was going well my try new things goal was suffering.    I am still trying to figure out the right balance of all the levers of things in my life but I think I’m getting closer to the right balance. 

Here are the books I read during the yearlong challenge:

I made a graph to show my progress throughout the year and you can see I had some months where I binge read and some where I barely finished any books.  

Whoa where did the month of March go?

So somehow I have managed to go the whole ENTIRE month so far without posting a single blog entry (insert mental picture of me scolding myself and making sad faces).  So here is a little update on the reason for absenteeism. 

• Work has gone into hyper drive as far as how busy I have been.  We have a major milestone this weekend and then things should calm back down for a few weeks, thank goodness!
• I have been very lazy with my free time at nights, after such long and tiring days at work I’ve been unwinding at night by becoming a zombie in front of the TV and going to bed early. 
• Keeping exercise in my routine on top of all the regular tasks has been taking up a lot of free time and energy but it’s paying off so I have to keep it up
• In less than 2 weeks we will be in Switzerland, hooray!  I have been busy preparing for the trip, researching sights to see, and frankly just daydreaming about the trip. 

I promise to try and catch up on lost time this week!  I also promise that April will be a big month for blogging for me since so many exciting things are on the horizon.