Friday 1 January 2016

Reading Challenges in 2015 and Goals for 2016

For the third year running, I kept track of the Australian-authored science fiction and horror I read throughout the year. Note I say kept track of, rather than challenged myself to read, since I wasn't particularly successful. I also participated in the Australian Women Writers Challenge for the fourth year. I've already written a detailed round-up for AWW, so in this post I will focus on my other two challenges.

On the science fiction front, I just scraped in at my goal. I read ten books and three new-to-me authors. Over the next year, I would like to exceed the bare minimum, although I'm not going to update my goal. In any case, finding three new-to-me Australian science fiction authors should be a bit of a challenge, increasingly as I read more authors.

The books read for my Australian Science Fiction Reading Challenge in 2015 are:

  1. Between the Lives by Jessica Shirvington (review)
  2. Space Dogs by Sophia Parsons Cope (review)
  3. The Female Factory by Lisa Hannet and Angela Slatter (review)
  4. Winning the King by Nicole Murphy (review)
  5. Crash by Sean Williams (review)
  6. Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff (review)
  7. Curses and Confetti by Jenny Schwartz (review)
  8. Letters to Tiptree edited by Alexandra Pierce and Alisa Krasnostein (review)
  9. Fall by Sean Williams (review)
  10. Cold Comfort and Other Tales by David McDonald (review)

I did rather more poorly on the horror front. I planned to read five horror books by Australian authors, and basically managed one. I did read a couple more for Aurealis judging which I didn't review, but that still doesn't meet my target, alas. I'm not changing my goal for 2016, but hopefully I will actually meet it.

The one Aussie Horror book I read was:

  • Cherry Crow Children by Deborah Kalin (review)

As well as the SF and Horror reading challenges, I will of course be participating the Australian Women Writers Challenge again. I will also still be writing the monthly round-ups for the AWW website. In the past I haven't set a specific number of books to read for AWW. This time I'm going to be slightly more explicit and say I want to read at least twenty-five, since I only managed twenty-two this year.

And finally, I want to do something about that list of books I haven't read but should've. I plan to cross off as many books from that list as I can, hopefully all of them (although it's not a short list...).

So those are my reading plans for the coming year. What are your goals and challenges, reading-wise, for 2016?


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