So how did January go...?

January has been strange. Very, very strange.

To my utter amazement I have managed to keep to my no-more-new-books (Double Dare) pledge! I wonder quite how many years it is since I last went a month without adding to Mount To Be Read?

I have also made some progress on various other reading challenges - and this rather the point of it all - I have read some very good books.

Resolution 1 was to Read More Big Books, and James Robertson's hugely impressive And the Land Lay Still is definitely big - smallish type pages, and covering a huge canvas, with enough storylines and sharply drawn characters to fill three novels.

I began my Read the Walk literary stroll to Zoo City, with W Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence, a very English novel about an artist who turns his back on England with some ferocity, travelling to France and then Tahiti in the manner of Paul Gaugin.

And I began my other own-creation challenge, 19/72, to read 19 novels by UK- based writers that were first published in 1972, with The Players and the Game.
 
I read The Newspaper of Claremont Street as part of Kimbofo's Australian Challenge, and could easily dally Down Under, perhaps as part of the 2012 Global Reading Challenge.

Finally, I tried a bit harder to read more non-work non-fiction and The Hare with Amber Eyes, drawn from Mount TBR, was a quite brilliant, five star start to 2012.

Comments

[Maxine]

Well done. I don't know many people who stick to their new year's resolutions until the end of January!