2015 Statement of Purpose:

I'm excited for another year of the reading challenge.  The last two years I really was only just getting back into reading with my own interests in mind again.  This upcoming year I'm not going to set myself up with a reading list that I chop away at as I did in the last two challenges.  Rather, my only goal is to reach the "trying" level of fifteen books.  My other goal is to read a little of many different topics (I'm going for financial reading, a biography or two, a title on religion and philosophy, a book concerning one of my hobbies, a history book, a sci-fi title, a Jane Austen title, a tasteful romance, a mystery or two, a couple of books about ADHD, self-help, a book concerning astronomy, begin reading Dante, and A Tree Grows In Brooklyn).  I've focused so much on fiction in the past and after working at a library I'm acquiring more of an appreciation for the very wide world of non-fiction books.  

I started last year expanding this blog beyond reading challenge reviews.  I would like to do more of that next year as well.  Blogging is something I never really understood - it seems to have its own culture of people who like to publish their every thought, people who appear to want to be writers/journalists but can't make a career of it, or who just participate in the blogging culture and so spend way too much time on the internet.  I don't prefer to read news on a computer screen - I usually try to stay up to date by watching BBC news or reading an occasional newspaper.  Recently, I've become someone who gets news from the newsfeed on facebook which I am trying to stop doing.  I don't tend to like to read other people's opinions of anything unless they know a bit about what they're talking about.  And so, I don't have any reasons to blog.  

I've decided to treat this blog as a review of books and as a chronicle of interesting things I've found, made, or done over the course of next year.  Kind of like an edited version of a private journal appropriate for public perusal.  I doubt anyone will read any of it - but it's ok if they do.