So, What Happened this Year? or Three Pathetic Excuses

Do I have to make excuses for my paltry showing (only 40 books, 12 short of my average and 18 short of last year)? Here are a few:

• I started a lot of books that I didn’t like enough to finish or hate enough to write about here. I was especially disappointed with my choices of mysteries and hardly finished any of the half-dozen or so that I tried to read. Hence lots of actual reading hours are unaccounted for on the blog. I chalk that up to bad luck and poor book research on my part. My friend Henry says I should just list all my rejects anyway, but that doesn’t seem right. There are lots of reasons to give up on a book and my most common one is that I am just not in the mood for it right at the moment. That hardly constitutes a fair analysis so for the most part I avoid that approach.
• I read a few really long books (Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin) so those should count double or even triple but it doesn’t work like that.
• I wasted a lot of time on the Internet. What a time suck. I think to myself “I’m going to go read, but first I’m just going to check my e-mail” and the next thing I know I’ve spent half an hour watching videos from the Scottish Screen Archive about Shetland sheep shearing in the 1930's.

I make no promises for next year. I do have some interesting things in mind to read, but who knows? Meanwhile, Happy New Year to everyone!