I’m not exactly sure how this happened, but here we are half way through 2018!

The first third of the year was loaded with emotional challenges for me and a lot of family “stuff.” My memoir project isn’t progressing as I’d hoped, and I did some serious re-grouping and evaluating my priorities going into this spring.

Fortunately, reading is an anchor in my life. Even when things are out of my control and my days are draining, I  make time to read. In fact, I had more reading time in this first half of the year than I’d anticipated when I set my goal of finishing 90 books in 2018.

As of this week, I’m at 63 books so far this year.

While that puts me on track to finish over 100 books this year, I’m currently increasing my writing time again. So if my reading slows down, I should still be able to meet my goal.

I’m participating in four reading challenges this year. The first three I talked about earlier in the year, one of which is my own that I’m hosting, and the fourth is being held by my local independent bookstore and I’m allowing myself to use titles from my other challenges to complete this one.

Out of the 63 books I’ve read so far this year, 48 are for challenge categories. The rest are miscellaneous for fun or self improvement.

For the While I Was Reading Challenge, I’m half way, with 6 of 12 tasks finished

For the PopSugar Challenge, I’ve completed 33/50 tasks

For the ReadHarder Challenge, I’m at 9/24.

So far my favorite book has been An American Marriage which is for the category of An Oprah’s Book Club Selection.

My favorite category has been A book that involves a bookstore or library, for which I read The Storied Life of AJ Fikry. 

The category I’m dreading the most is probably A book of genre fiction in translation, because I’m still not totally sure what that means!

What about you? How are your challenges coming along? What have been your favorites or not so much favorites?