Books in 2017

This year was awesome for books. I canceled Netflix for the year and found out that when I procrastinate doing chores or tasks, I watch t.v. instead. When there is no t.v. to watch, I read. And boy, did I procrastinate a lot this year:

So I read a ton of fantasy novels (my favorite genre) and quite a few thrillers and murder mysteries. I have never really been into mystery novels before, but I read Stephanie Meyer's The Chemist and realized that thrillers can be really exciting and fun to read, so then I read a bunch of Tess Gerritsen novels (she's amazing) and that led me to historical fiction mysteries by Rhys Bowen (the Molly Murphy series and the Her Royal Spyness series). They were super entertaining to read. To counteract this indulgence in silly fictional stories, I made sure to read plenty of biographies, nonfiction, and history. I feel like I read enough of those to justify all the silly novels that I enjoyed endlessly.

Reading this year has changed my life. It's made me more compassionate and more eloquent. Someone at church told me I use really fun vocabulary words and that made me feel good. I think on a lot of history these days and reflect over how far America has come from the days of blatant corruption (we certainly still have it but it seems to be less public now). One negative thing that I've noticed with my reading is that I still use it to procrastinate accomplishing my other goals. I've got a long list of resolutions to work on this year and they won't get done if I spend all my time in a book. I've set a much smaller reading goal for 2018 so I can learn to back off from one extreme goal and hopefully balance out my life more. But I'm still grateful for the experience of reading so many books in 2017. It was a heck of a ride.