Update: Epic Reading Quest

ETA: There are yet again links in this post that my theme swallows up for whatever reason. Anything italicised contains a link.

As some of you may remember, last year I embarked upon the Epic Reading Quest in order to cut down on my backlog of books. It's been a little over a year since I set upon this quest, so it's a good time as any to give a little update on how I'm going. To those of you who have visited my blog frequently over the past year, you would've possibly seen the "currently reading" books in my Goodreads page, shown in the gadget type thing on the right, changing over this past year.

You may also have seen a million "want to read" books popping up, but we don't talk about those.

Since the beginning of this quest in late August 2011 (though I didn't make the blog post on it until a month later), I've read 17 different books, of which almost all of these, excepting two, were in series of some sort. The unfortunate thing about this is that only four of these books were books that I have never read before!

Imagine that -- I somehow managed to turn a quest to cut down on my "not yet read" list to a "ooh I haven't read this book in a while and I remember how much I loved it"-fest. Oops?

Besides this, five of these books were even books that weren't on the list at all, but somehow managed to wrangle their way in, partially courtesy to my significant other and partially courtesy to my own short attention span.

13 of these books were in English, and four in Finnish.

Additionally, there are two books on this list that I began reading but couldn't finish (they're not listed in the totals, because that's hardly the point). One of these is Suzanne Collins' Mockingjay. I liked The Hunger Games, and I survived Catching Fire, though this survival was with considerable difficulty. By the time I got to Mockingjay, I just couldn't inflict that upon myself anymore -- not when there are better and more interesting books on my list. I won't lie -- it did grate on me a little to give up on a series when I got so, so close to the end; but that's my perfectionism speaking, and my love of lists, instead of any real desire to read that book. The other book that I began but couldn't get through was Robin Hobb's Fool's Errand, the first book in The Tawny Man trilogy. I've read this trilogy before, so not getting through this one wasn't a particularly huge tragedy when it comes to the Epic Reading Quest. I was a bit surprised not to get through it, though, because years ago, I loved these books. This time, I just felt annoyed and deflated by Fitz's constant angst, and in the end, decided to put the book down.

Tastes change, huh?

I'm currently reading Tolkien's The Hobbit in preparation for the upcoming film. After that, I'm yet again deviating from my list of upcoming books on my Epic Reading Quest to read Raymond E. Feist's Silverthorn. I blame my significant other for this -- we made a deal that involved him reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy if I read The Riftwar trilogy. It was a fruitful deal, and I'm hooked.

Perhaps after this, I will actually go back to my actual Epic Reading Quest list. I think that I'm going to have to clean it up a bit, perhaps taking some old favourites out and adding a few more new arrivals in, ones that were left out from the initial list. After I clean it up, I might post the list on here in its entirety, and maybe that will finally encourage me not to deviate from it overmuch.

Overall, I'm very satisfied with my progress. True, I haven't managed to read that many new books in this year. However, I've managed to establish to myself that I can read almost 20 books a year, even with university and work and all of those other things that take up my time nowadays. I've gotten used to reading again, and I think that's more important than anything else at this point. Besides, it's not like I've been buying more books, which is part of the pact that I made with myself until I finish this quest. I'm happy.