Goodreads Reading Challenge 2014

I tend not to live too much by New Year's Resolutions but at the beginning of 2014 I set myself a Reading Challenge. When I was growing up, I was the young girl who would walk to my local library carrying back home an armful of hardback books, so excited to read them that I would actually start a book on my walk home. Since the conception of this blog (and I hear this from many other people who work on-line a lot too) there has been a huge demise of book reading. Somehow my attention span seems to almost have completely disappeared, or to two minutes stints at least. So to be able to commit to and concentrate for any length of time on books is quite the achievement these days. I decided to set myself a challenge of 15 books, not sure at the time how difficult or easy it would be. By around the middle of the year I seemed to be flying, thinking I had set myself too easy a task but then all of a sudden towards the second half of the year things really started to slow down and I seemed to lose my reading mojo, worrying that I wasn't even going to be able to complete the 15 book challenge. But thankfully for my final book I chose one I found difficult to put down, and together with some time off work over Christmas managed to complete the challenge. I thought it might be interesting to share with you here the books I read this past year, I'm always looking for good suggestions, so you may be too...

1. Quiet - Susan Cain 2. Pictures of Lily - Paige Toon 3. The Paris Wife - Paula McLain 4. Pinball 1973 - Haruki Murakami 5. IT - Alexa Chung 6. A Moveable Feast - Ernest Hemingway 7. Just Kids - Patti Smith 8. The Circle - Dave Eggers 9. Almost French - Sarah Turnbull 10. Vivien's Heavenly Ice-Cream Shop - Abby Clements 11.The Secret History - Donna Tartt 12. Paris My Sweet: A Year in the City of Light - Amy Thomas 13. Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage - Haruki Murakami 14. The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt 15. Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn
Not all of the books I read I would deem great literary reads, but they were books I read nonetheless. I plan on setting myself another reading challenge for 2015, I'll move things up a notch to 20 books :) You can follow my progress on Goodreads here. And if you use Goodreads yourself, feel free to add me as a friend so I can see what you're reading too.