Before I get too deep into this year’s reading and start some new reading challenges, I want to see how I did on last year’s challenges.
Rereading Challenge – I finished rereading the Uplift series and definitely enjoyed myself. I think I’ll revisit another series this year.
New Books Challenge – I only got 6 out of the ten books I wanted to read. What I didn’t foresee was how difficult it would be to find new books in the beginning of the year. It really wasn’t until June that I started seeing books published in 2016 show up in my library. To make it more reasonable, I should have said books published in the past two years. If I include the books published in 2015, that adds another 11 books to the challenge. Apparently, I had no problem reading recently published books this past year.
Reading the Alphabet Challenge: My last book of the year finished the challenge! It’s very satisfying to have read the alphabet in both title and author names.
Maybe 100 This Year Challenge – This was finally the year I made 100! It helps when I include books that I listen to as well as books that I read.
If I consider a revision to the New Books Challenge, I finished all of my reading challenges this year. That has got to be a first!
ETA: this is the first year I’ve used Goodreads, and I didn’t realize they do an end of the year summary. I want to remember these numbers (and I’m not sure I’ll be able to find the page later). If you include all the graphic novels I read (which I don’t usually count toward my book total), I read 39,930 pages last year, which I have to say impresses me. My shortest book was Welcome to the Tribe and my longest book was A Dance With Dragons.
I originally saw this book on a GeekDad 
I’ve seen this book recommended as a good math read aloud by Thomas Jefferson Education homeschoolers. I was intrigued by the thought of a math read aloud and got the book.
I’m trying my hardest to finish up my Alphabet Reading Challenge. In this case, I was looking for a book title starting with V (finding titles starting with a specific letter requires wandering the library and just scanning titles until something catches my eye. Turns out I already had a V title that I hadn’t recorded so I didn’t need to read this one). Haven’t read any British historical fiction in a while, so this looked interesting and different.
After giving up on 
This is a classic kid’s book. We’ve got the second book in the series on the shelf, which I kept wanting to read. Better read the first in the series before the second. It was a nice change of pace from our last read aloud, 
This book has been on my reading list for over two years now, so it’s very satisfying to be able to finally cross it off the list. I put it on my TBR list after reading a “
The family took a quick trip to Toronto just before Thanksgiving. It’s only about a three-hour drive, but we needed something to listen to. My husband found this book and asked if it sounded interesting. I was thrilled to hear it was by Tamora Pierce, since I’d loved the other two series I’d read by her, 
I needed a U author for my Alphabet Reading Challenge. I didn’t have any U authors on my To Read lists, so it was down to “peruse the library shelves for something that looks interesting”. This sounded like a computer thriller and something different from what I’ve been reading lately, so I tried it.