Minor Thoughts from me to you

Over this past year, I read 69 books, a total of 31,138 pages. I had set a reading goal of 70 books and just barely missed it. By comparison, I read 3 fewer books than in 2014, but 154 more pages.

Overall, 2015 was a mixed bag for book reading. I had a hard time hitting my Goodreads goal. I'm happy with the literary fiction that I read, but disappointed that I didn't read more non-fiction. I read more hard science fiction (good), but didn't re-read any old favorites (bad). My reading goals were supposed to give me a focus, but I wasn't disciplined enough to actually read everything that I wanted to.

Here's how I did in each specific goal.

Reading Specific Authors

I had picked out several different authors that I wanted to explore this year. I did fairly well on this goal. I was:

• Brent Weeks: all 3 books
• Guy Gavriel Kay: 4 of 6 novels, including both of the duologies that I really wanted to read
• Robert Silverberg: 3 short story collections, out of 11 book ideas
• Jack McDevitt: 5 out of 14 novels, 2 in the Academy series and 3 in the Alex Benedict series
• William Gibson: nothing

I didn't read nearly as much of Silverberg as I'd originally intended to and I seemed to have skipped William Gibson entirely. I'm pretty happy with everything else though.

Reread Old Favorites

I failed at this goal. Theoretically, I gave myself permission to go back and re-read old favorites. In practice, I never actually did it. I did end up rereading Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy, but I wouldn't have even done that much had I not been reading them along with my wife.

Literary Fiction

I had pulled together a list of 6 literary novels that caught my eye. I surprised myself by actually reading 4 of them: Cloud Atlas, The Shadow of the Wind, The Orphan Master's Son, and The Book of Strange New Things. I consider The Orphan Master's Son and Cloud Atlas to be two of the best books that I read this year.

Hard Science Fiction

I've been wanting to read science fiction that's heavy on the science. I picked out 8 books and read 4 of them: The Martian, Dragon's Egg, Time, and Yesterday's Kin. I'd recommend both The Martian and Dragon's Egg to anyone else looking to read some science fiction.

Non-Fiction

I picked out 21 interesting books for my reading ideas list. I read none of them. This was an abject failure.

Interesting Hooks

I picked out 23 different books (or series) for my reading ideas list. I ended up reading 10 of them, which is great for a list that was basically a pile of anything that sounded interesting. Highlights include The Just City, The Three-Body Problem, and A Night of Blacker Darkness.