So, the New Year’s Resolution that I had made for myself was to read 52 books (averaging one a week). For the first few weeks it wasn’t going well. Five weeks in I had read two. But then the magical thing happened where I realized I could listen to audiobooks at work. And yes, I am counting those. I will argue all day that audiobooks count as real books, but for now let me just give you this one point: Audiobooks are real books. Moving on.

So, at this point, I’ve read sixteen titles. Since this is the eleventh week of the year, I’d say I’m doing pretty well. These titles vary in length, based on the actual medium I’ve read them in. For example, Emperor’s Soul is a novella that was less than five hours long. One book. Dangerous Women is an anthology of twenty-one novellas that is about thirty-three hours long. One book. So here is all the things I’ve read so far. The series title is mentioned before the colon:

1. Sabriel
2. Lirael
3. Mistborn: Bands of Mourning
4-6. The Reckoner’s Series
7. Sunless Sea (Game)
8. Bartimaeus: Ring of Solomon
9. Elantris
10. Emperor’s Soul
11. Warbreaker
12. Dangerous Women
13-15. Lockwood & Co. 1-3
16. The Postmortal

All but four of these have been audiobooks. So that being said, right now I’m working on a novel for one of my classes, “They Say/I Say”, soon I’ll pick up one of Terry Pratchett’s novels (probably Colour of Magic), and after that, I’m going to pick up Wheel of Time again. I read the first three books, but it was a few years ago so I’d like to start from scratch. It’s a daunting series to be sure. Fourteen books and each one is a monster. Their audiobook lengths are almost always at least twenty-five hours long, and the first four alone total over 120 hours. But it’s a classic and like all classics one can learn a lot from them.

So if I ever actually manage to get through Wheel of Time, I’ll have read around thirty-five books up to that point. Also on the list, I’m going to reread Lord of the Rings, then move on to The Inheritance Cycle. If I get far enough the Warcraft novels will come next, and maybe somewhere along the way I’ll finish Garth Nix’s Abhorsen series.

So all that being said I’m slowly becoming far more well read. I can pick out the authors’ voices in books, and have gotten a lot better at being able to predict what happens. That part is probably bad for a reader, but its good for the writer. If I know what happens, it also means I can write what happens. I already mentioned how good I feel about Dreamscape‘s outline. And if I feel good about how it is looking from the beginning, it can only get better, right? I still don’t expect to actually have time to write much, but Spring Break is on its way. I’ll still have work, but it means no school. So maybe I can use that time to really get started.