Reading Challenge 2020; The Final Update of the Year

A cover is not the book, so open it and take a look - Mary Poppins

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2020 Reading Challenge: 81 books out of 60 (135%)

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At the beginning of December, I lost my phone on a trip to London. I've only got my Samsung Smart Watch, which has been a godsend, but it's put me virtually out of contact with the rest of the world when I'm not on my laptop. So I think this loss has thrown me back into a very good relationship with my Kindle. I've been reading more the last three weeks than I had for the previous several months. Over the last few weeks, when I'm on the bus to and from work, I read. When I'm on my breaks, I read. When I'm at home, I read. Often over the last ten days or so I haven't been able to sleep straight through the night, so I read until I can't stay awake anymore. My Kindle a simple e-reader, it doesn't do more than display the books I have stored on it. It does connect to the internet but only to update my Goodreads account and the Amazon store. The paperwhite uses e-ink technology, which is basically the use of black and white particles to draw on the screen (for a more details description, click here). It's good for reading, but little else. So I've been burning through books at quite a rapid speed that surprises even me. I've had my Kindle for almost 3 years now, and I'm in no hurry to change it just yet. I'm surprised and grateful that it's lasted so long. It's a very hardy device and even though I've dropped it countless times and managed to get the front part of the kindle scratched up within a few weeks of having bought it because the cover I'd bought wasn't any good and flipped open as it dropped out of my bag.

In a way, the forced mobile phone detox really caused me to lean heavily on reading, which has kept me sane these last weeks. The Saturday before Christmas Boris Johnson put Surrey into Tier 4, which is basically putting us back into a lockdown similar to the lockdown we were put into back in March 2020. Beyond food shopping and going to work, there has been very little for me to do beyond reading and journalling, amongst other things. I'm missing the long summer days, but nothing beats those long nights curled up in bed with a good book. I've been reading so much that often I've finished one book and ended up struggling with what to read next. I've got quite a number of unread books on my Kindle, it's just choosing what one I want to get my teeth into next. I'm so glad my parents really encouraged a love of books and reading in me when I was little.

In the next week or so I'll decide what my 2021 reading challenge will look like. I've shocked myself with how many books I've read this year, but found the challenge of reading 60 b00ks this year just that, a huge challenge. I have enjoyed it but I think the only way I managed to pull it off was down to losing two jobs and having time between finding the next one when all I could do was read. When I lost the first job, I had three months when I had nothing to do, nowhere to go. Lockdown started and I couldn't go out and do anything. I also couldn't do any physical job hunting so I lost myself in the books I had on my kindle. When I lost my job at Francis Court we weren't in lockdown but I still returned to my kindle because the books I had were a safe place, compared to the rest of the world. I'll always think of books as that safe place for me to go, especially in troubled times... like what we've had over the last twelve months. I'm likely to go back to the standard 52 books for my 2021 challenge and see where the year takes us.

Until next year!