Well, I'm getting this post up a little late because this weekend was the 24 in 48 Readathon!! And instead of working on this post Sunday evening like I normally do, I decided to read instead. So here we are during naptime, and I can finally get this post written!

24 in 48 Readathon - The Stack and Updates

The Year of Billy Miller by Kevin Henkes (A cute read)
Torrent by Lisa Tawn Bergren (Time travel to medieval Italy. Yes, please!)
Mr. Lemoncello's Great Library Race by Chris Grabenstein (I loved this one!!)
Love Comes Calling by Siri Mitchell (A fast Christian fiction book was just what I needed for the readathon. I enjoyed this one.)

A Devil to Play: One Man's Year-Long Quest to Master the Orchestra's Most Difficult Instrument by Jasper Rees (This is a fun book about relearning the French horn. The band geek in me loves it!)
Doll Bones by Holly Black (I started this one Sunday afternoon, but had to put it down because it was too scary for reading just before bed. I'll keep reading it during the daytime!)
A Necessary Deception by Laurie Alice Eakes (And this was the book I picked off my shelves to read in the evening instead of Doll Bones. I'm loving it so far!)
Solo by Kwame Alexander (This is my audiobook from the readathon. I'm about halfway through. It's read by the author, which is awesome!)
Daniel Deronda by George Eliot (Making steady but slow progress. I'm on page 88 out of 710.)

The Interrupted Tale by Maryrose Wood (If I can get through all those books this week, then I'll be reading this one next!)

Well, I'm getting an earlier start than I planned! I figured I'd sleep in until my little guy woke up, usually about 8:00. But I woke up at 4:00 and couldn't get back to sleep. I finally decided to grab my stack of books and head downstairs for some early morning reading. Let the 24 in 48 readathon begin!

I'll be posting mostly on Litsy this weekend (@smilingshelves), but I'll check in here every so often with an update.

Time spent reading/listening: Eight hours and 16 minutes
​Number of pages read: 597

Time spent reading/listening: Five hours and 38 minutes
​Number of pages read: 442

Time spent reading/listening: Thirteen hours and 54 minutes
​Number of pages read: 1,039

This weekend is the 24 in 48 Readathon! It lasts from 12:01 a.m. Saturday to 11:59 p.m. Sunday. I have no delusions that I'm going to get a full 24 hours of reading in, but I am excited to spend as much time as I can reading away! I'm especially looking forward to this because it means my husband takes main charge of my son for the weekend - and I'm ready for a bit of a break. Over the past couple of weeks, my husband has gone on two business trips (this never happens!), for a total of almost seven days of single parenting. I can't wait to relax and escape into a book (or three) this weekend.

Here's the stack I'm planning to read from (which can always change). I intentionally picked books that I own (no library books!) so that I can keep chipping away at all the unread books on my shelves.

I don't have any special snacks planned, but I am going out to lunch (all by myself!) on Saturday. I can't wait for this weekend! Anyone else joining in the festivities?

This crazy Michigan weather! One day it's snowing a couple of inches, the next day it's 40 degrees and the snow is melting away. I really shouldn't complain about a reprieve of the frigid temperatures, but it's making it really hard to know what to wear from one day to the next! Ah, well. That's what I get for living in Michigan, I guess. :​)

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (I finished it! And I actually liked it a lot more than I thought I would. I really enjoyed Steinbeck's writing, especially in his descriptive chapters.)

Magic for Marigold by L.M. Montgomery (Even though I enjoyed The Grapes of Wrath, I still needed a bit of a pick-me-up after finishing it. What better than a Montgomery book?)
The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin (I'm almost done with this one. I'm only reading it while I put my son down for a nap, so it's taking a little longer to get through than it normally would.)
Daniel Deronda by George Eliot (A chunkster for my Classics Club list. This one I'm chipping away at only over breakfast, so my progress will be slow. Right now, I'm on page 32 out of 710.)

The Year of Billy Miller by Kevin Henkes (I'm hoping to slip this Newbery Honor book in next. Then this weekend is the 24in48 Readathon! I'll have a post up later this week with my stack for that. I can't wait!)

It's finally time for me to start signing up for reading challenges for this year! I love reading challenges, but I'm really trying to cut back this year. At the end of last year, finishing them all out just became a bit too stressful. So this year, I'm signing up for six. (That still kind of sounds like a lot, I know, but it's definitely less than it could have been!) I'm ready to get started reading and tracking!

It's always one of my goals to read my own books. Last week, I posted about my personal reading goals for the year, including having 50% of the books I read this year be ones I own. The Mount TBR Challenge, hosted by My Reader's Block, will definitely help keep me on track for this. I'm signing up for Mt. Vancouver, which means I need to read 36 of my own books.

I read fewer nonfiction books last year than any year since I started tracking my stats, so I'm signing up for the Nonfiction Reading Challenge hosted by Doing Dewey. We get to set our own goal for this one, and I'm choosing to aim for reading 15 nonfiction books.

This is the Litsy Passport Challenge, which I signed up for through the Litsy app. We chose a number of countries that we wanted to read books from, and then those countries were randomly selected for us. I chose 6 countries, and here's what I got: Armenia, Benin, Ireland, Kiribati, Tokelau, and Brunei. I have to admit that I hadn't even heard of two of those countries, so this will be quite the learning experience for me! I'm also discovering it's hard to find books set in a few of these places, so if you have any ideas, let me know!

Now for the kids' books! I'm again signing up for the Picture Book Challenge, hosted by Becky's Book Reviews. There are a couple ways to go about this challenge, but I'm choosing the checklist of 104 categories. It was a lot of fun to complete the giant checklist last year, and since my one-year-old devours books, I think it can happen again this year!

I LOVE middle grade books, so I definitely had to sign up for the MIddle Grade Reading Challenge, also hosted by Becky's Book Reviews. This one also has a checklist of 104 categories. Thankfully, a book can count towards two different categories (thanks, Christine!), but I still don't think I'll get all of them complete. I'm just going to try my best and see how I do!

And of course I have to sign up for my own challenge, the Newbery Reading Challenge! This year, I'm challenging myself to hit the Avi level, which is 45-59 points (check out the sign-up post to see how the points work). This is a level higher than I've signed up for in the past, but I think I can do it!

Well, my little guy and I survived a week alone! My husband was gone on a work trip from Tuesday morning to Friday night. That's the longest he's been gone since our son was born, and I'm happy to say that we all survived the separation. I know I am so blessed to have him here the vast majority of the time. Single parents are amazing. I don't know how they do it. I'm just glad our house stayed in one piece and my sanity is more or less intact!

Anne of Ingleside by L.M. Montgomery (I loved rereading this one for the umpteenth time. I'm hoping to sneak in at least one more Montgomery book this month.)
Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand (Another one off my Classics Club list! This play is amazing. I would love to see it performed sometime!)
The Lost Book of the Grail by Charlie Lovett (I think this might actually be my favorite of his. It was relaxing and suspenseful all at the same time, if that makes any sense.)

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (Next up for the Classics Club. I have to admit that I'm dreading this one a bit.)
​The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin (First Newbery read of the year!)

I honestly haven't really thought past The Grapes of Wrath, because that's a big, thick book, and I'm on page 2. Right now, I'm just hoping to make a lot of progress on it this week!

Last year, I made some general reading goals for myself, in addition to participating in way too many reading challenges. I'm really going to make an effort to cut back on reading challenges this year (we'll see how that goes), but I love the way my personal goals worked out for me last year - so I'm going to try that again! Here are my reading plans for 2018.

My deadline is the end of August, and it will be here before I know it! With the discovery of the Serial Reader app, I made a lot of progress on my list last year. But I still have a little ways to go, and I would really love to finish by my goal date. You can check out my full list here, but these are the books I have left to read in the next eight months: 

Inspired by posts on Litsy, I made a TBR Bingo card for myself back in August. I had a goal of reading ten books from it by the end of the year. I read six. I really want to read them all, so I cleared off a designated shelf to put them on, so that I can grab one easily and be constantly reminded to read them. I've already got one under my belt this year. Seven down, eighteen to go!

In 2016, only 26% of the books I read were ones I owned. In 2017, I set a goal to increase that to 50% and I succeeded with 51%! I feel the urge to challenge myself even more, but it was hard enough to achieve that percentage, so I'm going to stick with 50% again this year - and hope I blow past it!

Apparently with this fresh new year, I've decided to tackle a long overdue project. I'm going through all of my bookshelves and getting rid of books that I will probably never read, or ones that I've read and don't need to keep. It's amazing how much space I've cleared up! It was desperately needed, because I have piles of books that need a place on the shelves - and now they will hopefully have one! I'm really looking forward to organizing the books that are left, but first I need to deal with the books I'm giving away. I'm sorting into three categories - for my Little Free Library, for the local bookstore (so I can get some credit to buy more books), and for Goodwill. I didn't necessarily intend to start this project, but I'm so glad I did!

How Did I Do in My Reading Plans for 2017?
My Year in Books - 2017 (including my top reads of the year!)

Sourdough by Robin Sloan (This was a fun read. I didn't love it like I did Mr. Penumbra, but I did really enjoy it.)
Mail Obsession by Mark Mason (For Anglophiles and lovers of random facts! This book is awesome!!)

Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde (One of my 2017 goals was to reread one Jasper Fforde book a month. Well, he has 13 books published, so I had to continue a bit into 2018!)

Anne of Ingleside by L.M. Montgomery (I like to revisit Anne every January. This one is up this year!)

Another year has flown by so fast that I didn't even get a chance to get this post up before it ended! So once again, no fancy pie charts (sad, because I love those, but I just don't have the time!). Here are all my stats! I'm pretty surprised at how much reading I got in this year, while chasing around a one-year-old. We'll see if that continues as he gets older and harder to catch! :​)

Books read: 156
Pages read: 40,665
Audiobooks: 12%
Fiction: 81%
Nonfiction: 19%
Male authors: 48%
Female authors: 52%
Books I owned: 51% (Woohoo! Up from 26% in 2016!)
Books from the library: 49%
Set in the United States: 37%
Set in Europe: 36%
Set elsewhere in the world: ​10%
Set in a fictional place:​ 17%
Books published in the 2000s: 75%
Books published in the 1900s: 19%
Books published before 1900:​ 6%

Favorite fiction books: First Impressions by Charlie Lovett & The Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson
Favorite nonfiction books: Word by Word by Kory Stamper & American Eclipse by David Baron 
Favorite children's books (Am I allowed to have a three-way tie?): The War that Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley & The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic by Jennifer Trafton & The Ark Plan: The Edge of Extinction by Laura Martin
Favorite young adult book: North! or Be Eaten by Andrew Peterson (the second book in the Wingfeather Saga)
Favorite series:​ The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place series by Maryrose Wood