Happy new year, readers and fellow bloggers!
I hope you all had a good break and got plenty of reading done. My holiday was a rather different one this year. Straight after Christmas I was with family in East Anglia, so there was very little reading time. We then went on a family skiing trip to a very beautiful and very snowy Austria for New Year. (We love skiing, but I am always relieved when we all come home injury-free!)
It was probably our best family ski trip ever, in an area we have never previously visited, Serfaus-Fiss-Ladis in the South Tirol. There were very few British accents to be heard and fellow skiers were overwhelmingly Austrian, German or Dutch so it seemed to us to be well-kept secret. It was stunningly beautiful and we enjoyed the unusually bountiful snowfall, even if that caused us some problems getting back home.
Despite being outside skiing all day I did get a fair bit of reading done and managed finally to break the back of a book I have been reading for some time now – The Overstory by Richard Powers, the final one of the Man Booker Shortlist 2018. It’s a wonderful and brilliant novel, but it’s very long and quite hard work. The prose is a joy so much so that you simply have to read every word, which makes it doubly time-consuming. So, it was the perfect holiday choice. I’ve still not quite finished!
Over the holiday I also completed Michelle Obama’s Becoming. This is a much faster read and very different, though also thoroughly enjoyable. Look out for my reviews of both books over the next couple of weeks.
I’ve been putting some thought into my reading plans for 2019 this last few days and have just launched this year’s Facebook Reading Challenge. If you’d like to join us do pop over to the page to have a look at the list of themes for the year. The title for January is Beryl Bainbridge’s The Bottle Factory Outing, which I gather is very funny so I’m looking forward to starting it.
I’m also planning to visit the Hay Festival again this year, which I attended for the first time in 2018. I loved it so much that I now intend to make it a regular part of my annual calendar. I am lucky enough to live in Manchester where we have a fantastic literary festival every Autumn. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make any of the events last year (the speakers I wanted to see all sold out very quickly so I need to be more on the ball this time) so that will also be a priority for 2019.
My other big goal this year is to attempt to get my own book published. I’ve been working on it for about 18 months now and finally finished the revisions to my second draft in December. I feel it’s now time to put it in front of someone else for feedback – a terrifying prospect, but a necessary one. I feel sick even thinking about it!
I hope the year ahead will be joyfully book-filled. What a wonderful hobby we share!
What are your literary plans for 2019?
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