At one point in time, I owned over 500 books. For a teenager/college student, that was a rather impressive library. I was proud of my book collection and my ability to read several books in a week.
All that changed when I moved in with my now-exhusband. In the 4 1/2 years that he spent without a full-time job with me supporting him, I sold all but a few of the books just to have money for food. Also, he would get jealous any time anything took my attention away from him, so he'd get mad and abuse me any time I tried to read, so eventually I just stopped even trying to read.
Last year, I began reading again, mostly due to the influence of my fiance who always has a book in hand. I attempted to keep track of what books I read through an application on Facebook, but suddenly it stopped working so I lost my list and I lost track of the number of books I read overall.
This year I made a resolution to keep better track of what I read and when I read them. It's partially just out of curiosity to learn how many books I can read (I know I'm not quite the speed-reader that I used to be), partly because no one seems to believe that I can read so fast, and also partly because I want to see how much money I drop on books in 2012. I've found another Facebook application to use, but who knows if and when it will stop working, so I decided to start cataloging my literary activities here. I need something permanent.
I love reading books that I can escape into. Anything that can take myself out of my own mind for a while is great, but you'll find that I read a lot of books that are targeted mostly toward teenagers, despite being in my 30s, and I love almost anything related to vampires. I'm addicted to the "young adult" section of bookstores. I can't help it. I also love reading mental illness-related or addiction-related memoirs because, frankly, they help me feel more sane. (I also own a bunch of books about sex as you can see from the photo above due to my interest in sexual psychology, but I seriously doubt you'll ever see me do a post about one....)
You'll see that I have a basic template for what information I'm trying to catalog. Over the year, I may add things or subtract things, but it will probably stay mostly the same.
I am keeping an ongoing book count in the titles of each post. If a post says "Book #31," that means it's the 31st book I've read this year. If it doesn't include a number in the total, it means the post is unrelated to my current count of books. You can also see a quick list of books by clicking on the link above.
I may, from time to time, write about books I've read in the past in addition to what I'm reading now.
Really, at this point in time, I have no idea where this blog is going to go, but I'm going to do my best to keep up with my reading and with my blog posting.
I guess we'll just see how this goes ...
