This year has been a very slow start on the reading front. By this time last year I was storming ahead and had read 16 books, thanks in the main to a combination of work travel and holiday. This year my pathetic total is three, having read Holy Island by LJ Ross in January (Christmas gift from Auntie Frances), and finishing two more in the last couple of days.
Fever Pitch was a good one to have on the go on my Libby library app, and easy to dip in and out of, thanks to the way Hornby organised his thoughts game by game. An excellent choice for a struggling reader at the moment (looking back I'd read 'Just like you' and 'High fidelity' pretty recently), and I must make a point of picking some more of his off the shelves soon.
Surprisingly Bond #5 took longer to get through. Previously I'd zipped through Bond books in a couple of days, but not this one. Might have been me, might have been the book. Clearly Fleming thought that he was well set by book five and could experiment a little, and so Bond doesn't actually show up until half way through the book, having spent the first 100 pages or so learning about the dastardly Russian plot against him. We discovered that Tiffany Case had left him and gone back to America, and that he was office-bound and living what was described as 'the soft life'. The action, such as it was, involved Bond going to Istanbul, waiting to rendezvous with the girl who was going to entrap him, and taking the Orient Express back towards Paris. That's about it. Oh, and he appeared to have been poisoned at the end!
Anyway, my reading slowdown took hold towards the end of 2020. I'd set myself an ambitious target last year, and the slowdown meant that I just missed it. Having started to record progress on Goodreads at the start of 2011, I'd reached a decade at the end of last year, and wanted to have reached 500 books. My slowdown resulted in me missing by an annoying four. Therefore, having read three so far this year, I am on 499.
Looking back at the start of Goodreads, my first book was 'One Day' by David Nicholls (see also this blog post which refers to me waking Nicky up in the middle of the night to talk about it!), so I think it might be fitting if book 500 was also a David Nicholls one ...