Wanted to post at least 1 item before the year’s end.

Reading Books.

TL;DR Do yourself a favor and create an account on GoodReads, go the extra step of signing up for the yearly reading challenge.

From a young age I loved reading books and it was my mom who (inadvertently) got me into the habit. For her it was yet another way to keep me occupied, whenever she had some major work to be done or for that matter just wanted some peace and quiet she would buy me a bunch of books. You see we had just the one tv channel and no ipods/ipads/computers/gameboys etc that we now have to keep young people out of trouble and boy did I get into trouble.

I was a big fan of Hergé‘s creation TinTin, there were a lot of other comics and slowly I graduated to reading novels, it helped that my father was also a voracious reader and I could just borrow his books.  This was all great but it didn’t last, I noticed a steep decline in my reading over the years (Full time job, marriage, kids, the Internet, Age of Empires and World of Warcraft took a big chunk of my time).

And then came the Kindle sure there were other e-book readers before it, but nothing that beat the convenience of the Kindle and thus I slowly got back to reading, I already had a list of items I had to catch up on but once that list was exhausted where do I look up for more inspiration ? Enter GoodReads, if you don’t know what GoodReads is I highly recommend you stop reading this silly post and head on over to https://www.goodreads.com/.

GoodReads is an awesome website packed with great features like:

• Look up any book and read in depth reviews.
• Follow authors
• Keep track of what you have already read (and how many times)
• Get recommendations based on your past reading habits.
• And to top it all off few years ago they introduced a feature called the Yearly Reading Challenge.

This meant now you could actually commit to something at the beginning of the year and make sure you were on track, also everybody now knows what you have signed up for !!!! Let me tell you for procrastinators like me this was a god-sent.

Yes there was a year when I almost did not make it and crammed in couple of SciFi novels at the end of the year, but overall I am happy to report that this has been a great motivational tool to help me get back to reading.

Happy Reading!