2020 Books

This year, one of my challenges is to read more.  Growing up I always had my nose in a book, my love of reading was discovered was when I brought a secondhand Jackie Collins novel; Hollywood Wives I think it was. We were on a camping holiday, I was around 13/14, I can't quite remember where but we happen across a flea market and looking through a books stall the glossy front cover attracted my eye and on reading the opening page the book was for me! 

Elaine Conti awoke in her luxurious bed in her luxurious Beverly Hills mansion, pressed a button to open the electrically controlled drapes, and was confronted by the sight of a young man clad in a white T-shirt and dirty jeans pissing a perfect arc into her mosaic-tiled swimming pool.

Apparently, I spent the rest of the holiday with my nose in that book from walking down the street, at the dinner table, in the car car and by the pool!

From that moment on I've always been a fan of trashy novels, romcom, crime fiction and the odd autobiography, most of all I mainly like read novels with a strong female lead. In the past, I would devour books at a rapid rate, then my days got filled with other stuff like work, study, TV and running, which meant  the reading took a backseat.

Whilst physically reading books stopped when I took up running, I became a fan of audiobooks and found a new way to get my fiction fix; as the miles flew by so did the books. Many blissful miles have been run,  thanks to Stephen Fry I read (listened) to all the Harry Potter books, then there was The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, a number of Daniele Steeles, The Long Run, and the Peter Grant series by Ben Aaronovitch....a full list of my audiobooks can be found here....but I soon found that I needed to mix up my listening material and started to mix up the audiobooks with music and many podcasts, slowly the books fell away and it as mainly music and podcasts. 

Then the number of books listened to reduced, the number of podcasts increased and the only time for books was on holiday and boy did I get through them!! With the advent of the Kindle, it made not only transporting books but getting books instantly much easier, but the beauty of going to a physical book shop is that you see interesting covers of other books, as you pass by. In the early days of Kindle you only really got information on the authors you had read previously, hence there could be long gaps before a new title was released and my holidays coming around again! 

In late 2019 I was spending too long on my phone, scrolling through Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, once bored with those I would start playing candy crush or spider solitaire and loose hours of my day and my kindle app was gathering techy dust!!

I made a decision to read more, after blowing the dust from my kindle app (trying desperately to remember my password!), I  realised that there were a couple of books that were purchased back in March that had not read yet, their purchase most have coincided with our return from holiday! 

So like most good training plans, it's about creating a good habit, late last year I committed to reading a chapter of each book before going to bed each night and asked Twitter to recommend some books for me to have qued up for 2020.  

My 2020 challenge is live, I have deleted both Candy Crush and Spider solitaire and aim to read at least 20 books in 2020.  If you have a book you think I would like, then drop me a tweet or comment on this post and I'll add it to the list, another aim along with reading the books is to broaden my tastest into other area and genre. To keep everyone updated on my progress there will be the odd blog post and a dedicated page Book Club 2020 page, with a little bit about each book and a link to amazon.