Last year, I bought the newest Kindle Paperwhite; it's awesome! This year, I read almost zero books on it; that's awful! Goodreads thoughtfully reminded me how badly I bombed my Reading Challenge 2023. And you know what? No worries.
This was a year for gaming more than reading. It began and ended with EPIC deep and wide games that I was intent to enjoy. For those, see My 2023 Gaming Retrospect. So of course I didn't find much time or focus to read long-form despite having a great gadget for book consumption. I even have a Rare Backlog of Books.
Every year, my norm is to challenge myself to just 12 books read in a year, so one per month. Simple. I've succeeded in that more than once. This year, not so much. But to be honest, I haven't been itching for any particular good reads. Yet I know I have some ready to go, so maybe in 2024 I'll read more.
Maybe not.
I've not yet finished the huge game, Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. It's so big and so good and I don't want to rush through without appreciating and enjoying most of it. After that, you guessed it: more big RPGs to play. Still, I think there could be a way to squeeze more reading in.
My other giant focus that wasn't gaming or reading this year was building a new bathroom addition onto our house, which took me three solid months. There was much mental planning, running to Lowe's for materials, and physical labor. The task was daunting; I had to stay laser-focused. If I backed my foot off the gas pedal, it would have been hard to regain momentum.
So basically, I read only two whole entire books this year. The latest one in October was by Taylor Lorenz called, Extremely Online.
I liked the early parts of the book since they were about stuff on the internet that I took part in, like the early days of Social Media and Blogging. But the latter parts about new trends, which I skipped, were less personally interesting. In fact, the tales about Snapchat, Vine, most of IG, and TikTok actually make me glad I skipped those platforms. YouTube, Twitter, and Blogging were more my thing.
And that about sums up my reading for 2023. Not much to it. Hopefully, there will be a little more to it for 2024.
Update: How could I forget the biggest book I read all year? The Bible! Using a reading plan in my Bible app, I finished reading the entire Bible in chronologcial order ahead of schedule in early December.