My 52-Book-Year Challenge

Just a few of the eBooks on my iPad 

Welcome to my 52-book-year challenge. I have always been an avid reader. My mother used to recall how, as I child, I could often be found in a quiet corner of the large garden surrounding our home reading comics and books.

This love of reading helped guarantee good English grades throughout my school years, and the enjoyment and knowledge I get from books has continued throughout my life until here I am, at age 68, still trying to match the rate of my book reading with the pace of my book buying.

Already this year I have purchased 32 print books, and eight eBooks! I have read eleven books to date, and my goal is to read a minimum of 52 books by the end of the year. I managed to do this last year, despite spending three months in New York City (from where, by the way, I returned to Australia with a small case filled with books).

In 2015, I read a total of 90 books. No wonder I needed to invest in a new pair of reading glasses! Of course, I have not been able to maintain this reading pace all my life. Work and family obligations, as well as other interests and activities, often got in the way of my reading habit, and ate into much of the spare leisure time I had to devote to my book collection. However, now that I am retired I seem to have hours to spare, and when not online reading through my daily newspaper and magazine updates from the New Yorker, New York Times, The Guardian, and other online publications, I make time to work through my ever expanding collection of books.

Given the extent of my current book collection, both in print and digital form, I have more than enough books to keep me reading for the next couple of years before I have to supplement my reading list. However, I simply can't walk past a bookshop (whether selling new, secondhand or remaindered books), without stopping to browse the titles on display.

My voracious appetite for books ranges across fields and genres that include history, crime, travel, literature, philosophy, politics, the arts (music and film), and many others. The genres I rarely if ever read include romance, historical fiction, food related titles, fantasy novels and far too many other genres to mention. There are simply not enough hours in the day, or years left in my life to read all the books I would like to be able to read.

I will endeavor to add reviews of all, or most of the books I read to this blog as the year progresses.