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.