I’ve missed writing while a few other things took much more of a priority. As with every start to the new year and also my birthday, it’s been a great time to think about this and work out how to shuffle things around a bit to make sure I can fit in those things that I think are important too rather than just those that seem urgent or necessary.

Sometimes that thing is sleep so I need to be careful with this one!

New Year’s Day public holiday was as a day off for me too. This gave me time to rest, clean up a bit (you know, that kind of clean up that requires a bit of pottering around, some dilly-dallying, followed by totally emptying out a cupboard / desk space etc and getting rid of a lot of stuff) and more time to rest.

And dilly-dally.

This unearthed a few things I hadn’t seen for a while, including my bullet journal from 2017-2018.

Part of dilly-dallying includes reading these things so I opened it while sitting at my desk and sat back for a quiet read.

One part of bullet journaling I like (there are quite a few) is the keeping of various lists. You can tailor these to whatever you want. Not surprisingly, I had a list of 20 books I wanted to read in 2018.

I had ticked one off so I read through the list to see which else I had read as I stopped keeping this journal while I was traveling. Given the way I had been using it before, I can see why I stopped as it was no longer serving it’s original purpose.

Anyway, as I went through the list, I couldn’t remember if I had read a few of them or not so went to check my trusty Goodreads accounts. I keep track of a lot of books I’ve read there as well as those that I’d like to read. This list is considerably longer than 20 which is why I would have written out a sub-list for the year.

As I looked up these books, I saw that some have been on my list since 2016!

Turns out that I had read six of the 20 books.

Again, understandable given that I was traveling that year and also the subject matter of the books.

What was really interesting though is that I reread all the summary pages for the books I hadn’t read. I found that I’m still keen to read them all!

Now I’m trying to decide if I should just roll this list over to this year or come up with a totally updated list.

I’m still going with my resolution from a few years ago where I was not buying new books unless they met some specific criteria. This has been very successful and I’ve read quite a bit of my Kindle backlog and a few of my hardcover versions too as a result.

I’m going to keep going with this one and see what of my 2018 list is already on my Kindle and perhaps use that as my starting point.

Tough life when my biggest decision of the day is planning what I’d like to read for the year!


* Thanks to Huey Lewis & the News for the title to this post.