It all started in 2012 when I stumbled upon a blog post (don’t have the link anymore, sorry) where a guy described how he wanted to change one thing for the next year. He realized how lazy he was when it comes to reading. He said he only managed to read a bit online and still felt that it was too much. Watching TV was his only real hobby and this had to change.

He challenged himself to read one book every week for an entire year. He managed to pull it through and felt proud of himself at the end of the year. “I can do that too!”, was my initial reaction and so everything began.

I had a few book purchased before so I thought I can just start with them and see where it gets me. I have read many books by John Grisham who covers a wide area of topics but I really like his legal thrillers best. I dipped into the fantasy world with books by Terry Pratchett and Brent Weeks, went on a few adventures with Bear Grylls (awesome man!) and a few little guys from Middle-Earth showed me that you can achieve great things when you work together. I went behind enemy lines with Ken Follett, Tom Clancy and Mark Owen. I realized that I love Stephen King’s books despite having problems with the beginnings of them. Jo Nesbo became one of my favourite writers and Chris Ewans is just an awesome guy who’s book made me really laugh. George Orwell really made me think about the world around me and what society we live in especially after the NSA things became public.

There are a lot more books from other writers I got my hands on but this would just be to long to list them all (each book is reviewed so feel free to find what you like:))

The challenge itself was really straight forward. Read x amount of pages per day and you will make it till the end of the week. Executing this was a little harder and sometimes I spent 5-6 (or even more) hours reading (usually during weekends) to “catch up”. Everything was going fine until August when I went on holiday. I packed my bag with a few books which I read on the beach and I thought I was keeping up with my schedule but as it turned out I haven’t. So I had to push a little harder after that but then came a lot of other things I had to take care of and time became a resource that was hard to find for me.

I had to “cheat” a few times by reading books of around 150 pages (usually they were around 320+). I attended a power reading course which I hoped would help me read the books faster so I would have more time doing other things (developing Windows Phone apps for example) but as it turned out it just made me lazy. Why reading every day when I can finish a 300+ book in a few hours. The books kept piling and I really had to do something about it.

I focused again on the challenge and here I am 52 books later happy that it’s over.

It was funny how through the entire year I was carrying a book with me pretty much everywhere and tried to “squeeze” in a few pages here and there. I read “real” books (actually I have 50 of the 52 books in my collection), on the phone, on the computer and on my Kindle which is an amazing piece of technology. I highly recommend everyone to get one if they like to read books. I have a Kindle Paperwhite which is just phenomenal in all conditions.

Would I do it again? Probably not in this format. I would rather pick 20 great books and read them in a nice pace then 52 very good in the same amount of time.

Now that the year is over I am looking for something new to do this year. I always wanted to learn another foreign language. I speak English and German so I guess I might take on Italian this year.

How it will turn out is something I might write a post or two

I’ll say goodbye to you with an image of me and (almost all) books I have read this year.