So, with the end of another month, time to milk another post out of the ongoing process of monitoring my progress on all these reading challenges. (One, two, three.) As with January, I’m going to do a small snapshot report on where I stand in regards to my initial reading plan, and where there’s been changes.

And, in light of the new diagnosis and research project I have going on, I’m also going to be putting some thought into a change of direction for the rest of 2019.

I read 8 books during the month of February, which means I’ve gone from being slightly behind pace to slightly ahead of pace when calculated towards than year-end goal of reading 75 books. Seven of the books were chosen from my original reading plan, and the 8th ended up being swapped in for a weak category match—so all my reading in 2019 thus far has been in dialogue with my challenge lists.

I read all 4 books scheduled for February’s Around the Year categories, as well as the first March book for there:

• Hag-Seed
• Sing, Unburied, Sing
• Scott Meyer’s first two LitRPG books; and
• Binti

I also read two books for PopSugar categories: Fangirl, from my Kindle library, and The Kite Runner, which also checked a box on the Bucket List. And finally, I swapped Radical Candor in for a Book Riot business category that I’d initially made a poor match for.

I captured my thoughts on two more films: Mary Poppins Returns and Snatch. I did not start waxing philosophical about music.

And I only wrote 18 posts.* If I’m going to hold to that 300-posts-in-a-year goal I set (once I realized that 365 was way unrealistic of me), I’m gonna have to pick up the pace a bit. It’s achievable, but I may need to grow my willingness to put myself out there when I’m raw and hurting, rather than skipping so many nights while I’m feeling sorry for myself about various things.

Speaking of “various things”—like the medical diagnosis I shared yesterday, and the amount of nutritional/HAES/fat activist reading I’m gonna have to do over the next several months—I feel pretty well justified in making a bold forecast about my 2019 reading challenges.

No way in hell am I going to meet them all. Might as well let that dream go right now.

I think the overall goal of reading 75 books is likely still going to happen, but there is now guaranteed to be a good number of those books that don’t hit any of the categories or criteria I’d initially planned to be checking off. So I don’t see how it’s even remotely possible for me to be able to check off all the categories from all three of these challenge lists.**

I’m not yet sure what my revised plan is going to be. Part of me is drawn towards focusing on the books that are already in my possession. That would help clear more of the backlog of my own shelves, but would also mean I continue scattering categories across all three lists rather than completing any single list.

Alternately, I could focus exclusively on one list, and ignore the other two until and unless I get the first one completed.

There’s goods and bads to both approaches. For the moment, I’m just gonna finish all the books I’m in the middle of reading, regardless of which list they’re on and what categories they fit. I assume my first few orders for the “prediabetes reading list” will have arrived by the time I finish these three books, so then I’ll be diving into that high-priority reading.

However, I know I’ll want to be doing some recreational reading alongside of the PRL***, so I’ll keep reading some of my challenge choices to fill that desire. Once I figure out what system I’m using to choose which books and categories make it into my schedule, y’all here at JALC will be the first to know.

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* Whoops.

** It was a nice idea while it lasted.

*** I so need a catchier name for this.

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Image credit: Max Pixel, public domain.