2013 in Review

How is it already January 4, 2014?! I feel like I blinked and 2013 is finished, gone, kaput, over. Ah well, January is a time of reflection so here goes.... My look back at reading in 2013.

Challenges that I took on 
In 2012 my reading slowed down so for 2013 I decided to take on only one reading challenge: The Middle East Reading Challenge, hosted by Maphead. I promised to do the Tourist Level of 1 to 5 books and I did complete that task. However, I wish I had read more books on the Middle East, I certainly have enough books on the topic sitting on my TBR shelf! Here's what I read for this challenge:

• City of Veils by Zoe Ferraris (set in Saudi Arabia)
• Children of Dust by Ali Eteraz (set in Pakistan and Kuwait)

I also have two challenges that are on-going: The Chris Crutcher Reading Challenge hosted by Anne Bennett of My Head is Full of Books and the Winter Olympics Reading Challenge.

• The goal of the Chris Crutcher challenge is to read all his books, but I only read one this year: Period 8, which was really good!
• The goal of the Winter Olympics challenge was to read books about/set in/by authors from all 26 countries that won a medal in the 2010 Winter Olympics before the 2014 Sochi Olympics begins. When I signed up two years ago this sounded so easy and now the Olympics begin in only a month! Over the past two years I've only read books that qualify for 10 of the countries: Germany; USA; Russia; Poland; Australia; France; Great Britain; China; Japan; Canada; and the Netherlands

My favorites of 2013

The following books ranked 5 stars out of 5 stars for me at the time that I read them. It's funny that months later, I don't know if I agree with those rankings, but I am listing them all here because at the time they obviously made me feel really good when I read them. It would be really difficult to pick just one of these books as my ultimate favorite since they all bring something different to my reading needs!

I hope you had a wonderful reading year in 2013 and have begun 2014 with a good reading attitude and fun books on your TBR list!