Reading Challenges: 2014 Wrap-up

Well clearly I failed at one portion of my self assigned reading challenge, in my initial post for my 2014 reading challenge I said I was going to post updated reading bingo cards every month, something which I obviously never did because there are no further posts about it on the blog. In fact there weren't many posts at all from me over the last year. A total of 6 posts for the year and that's it. 2014 was a strange year for me, I started writing e-book reviews for Parajunkee's view if you recall, but not long after I started doing that I was laid off from my job in early February and so all of my energy ended up going into job hunting so having to write a book review every two weeks became too much for me and I ended up stopping after only about 3 reviews :(. It took 6 months to land a new job, but I did and it's a wonderful job and I love it. It's a full-time permanent position and it makes me very happy. I've been there since August and I've got enough of a routine down now that I think I will have more time to blog this year. I've missed writing about books and reading actually so it'll be nice to do it again. I don't think I'll give myself a fixed schedule right off the bat, but that may come again.

So, let's get down to business. Reading challenges, I like them, I do them every year as you know. For 2014 I said my goal was 52 books, and I surpassed my goal again :D (thanks largely to finding the entire Archie Americana series on the shelves at the library I work at, so that knocked out 12 books in about 5 days which caught me back up after getting behind). I ended the year with 62 books. As you'll see if you visit my books in 2014 shelf on Goodreads, which I just linked to in the previous sentence, you'll notice an eclectic mix of comic books, really old YA, lots of new YA, a crapton of different types of fantasy, some mysteries, and a whole lot of harlequin and harlequin imprints books. I discovered the joys of paranormal fantasy romances last December in the push to finish my 2013 reading challenge. This year I discovered that those category romances you find in the bookshelves of department stores, or at least the Nocture category specifically, are actually pretty good! Yeah they're smutty, but I like smut, fanfiction got me into smut haha. They're fast little entertaining reads that I can get through in one sitting, I like books like that as I have mentioned before. If you go back and re-read the post about my 2014 reading challenge, or if you can just remember that far back, or even just back to the first sentence of this post, you'll remember that in 2014 I didn't just have a number in mind for books, but I decided to play Random House's reading bingo as well.

Let's have a look at my finished cards then and see how I did.

My Cards (as of Dec. 31, 2014)

General reading bingo:

Young Adult reading bingo:

Out of both cards there were only 6 squares that I wasn't able to fill in with any of the books I read. I did read a book set in Paris, but it wasn't a YA book so I couldn't count it. 

Coming up next? A post about my 2015 reading challenge :)