2016 is here! A year of extra days, presidential elections, Olympic games, and a birthday that ends in zero. It’s going to be a BIG year, and I hope to enhance it be reading a huge number of books!

I’m taking part in a couple of different challenges in hopes to keep my reading varied… and also to keep me from doing nothing but reading all of the Discworld novels in a calendar year. Though that would be a fun project…

Anyway, I’m sticking to three different challenges for now :

Read About Where – this is one I made up for myself. The gist is to read 12 books set in different places around the globe. I’m kicking that off by finally digging into Charles C. Mann’s 1491… though I’m not sure what continent to place it in, as it’s a mix of North and South America. Maybe I’ll just read 1493 and count the two books for both? My rules!

Pretty Books 2016 Classics Challenge – As much as I read, there are still a million titles I’ve never dug into. So I’m going to dip into this challenge, which involves reading one classic each month, starting with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. I’m going to get several of these titles from the 50 Books To Read Before Your Die group on Goodreads. It seems like a good place to start!

Goodreads 2016 Reading Challenge – Speaking on Goodreads, my final challenge is to do their yearly self-driven book count. I’m going to try and hit 52 this year, which would probably be the most I’ve read in a 12 month period…. ever. But I blame that on my love of big books. Brothers Karamazov should count at least 3 times, right?

Miscellaneous Notes – I really need to read more books that I already own. My non-fiction shelf at home, for example, has at least a dozen titles I’ve never picked up. January is going to be my month of no book buying. I swear, I’m going to try really, really hard!