Reading Plans and Goals for 2022

Happy new year, I wish everyone a safe and terrific 2022!

I'm starting the new year with big reading plans, joining various reading groups, book clubs and challenges that I'm all excited about, so let's take a look at them.

Whereas I participated and successfully completed the a-z authors challenge last year (a-z refers to the authors' names which must begin with each letter of the alphabet), in 2022 I am doing the a-z book title challenge where I'll read 26 books whose titles begin with each letter of the alphabet. I'm still kind of struggling with the letters X and Q, so if you have any suggestions, let me know. 

Another challenge I'll join is "Reading Rhythm", where I am given a list of song titles and need to find book titles that match the songs. The more books I find the higher my status is, but I'm not very ambitious and for now I'll start with the "casual listener mode" which consists of five books/songs:

Exit Strategy by Martha Wells (Song: Robots in the Garden by Autolux);

Little Sister Death by William Gay (Song: The Word that Maketh Murder by PJ Harvey)

The Devourers by Indra Das (Song: Tender as a Tomb by Tennis)

The Embroidered Book by Katie Heartfield (Song: Royals by Lorde)

Zombies Vs. Unicorns ed. by Holly Black (Song: Zombie by The Cranberries)

This will be fun!

The world tour book club that I discovered last year where we read a book from all around the world (and not only from US or UK) each month, switched to a bi-monthly basis this year, much to my dismay... There may be fewer world tour discussions, but it makes it easier to keep up and maybe even squeeze in a buddy read here and there.

I'm also happy to continue the buddy reads that two friends from the general circle of the Otherland Bookstore and I have started, reading women horror/sff authors every three months or so. I think I may have mentioned it before, since we were planning on presenting those books here on the blog too, but life got in the way and it somehow never happened. So it is a great new year's resolution to absolutely start a series here on Protean Depravity where we, C. Mörk Rymden, Dorothy Scarecrow and The InciNerator (guess who that is?) present and discuss the (so far) great books we read. The Mere Wife by Maria Davanah Headey, The Good House by Tannarive Due are the two books we finished and we're still reading The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. It will be awesome to have some different points of view here on the blog, so I'm really excited for that and you should be too, stay tuned!

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like there are many fresh releases that I feel seriously excited about in 2022, so I thought it would be a good time to clean up my backlist and my to-be-read shelves. And yeah, I need to save some money too. That's why I will try and not purchase too many new books this year and will, except for ARCs from authors or publishers, concentrate on somewhat older books, usually from the last five years. The pictured Animal Money by bizarro author Michael Cisco and Junji Ito's masterwork Uzumaki are only two of the awesome books/graphic novels that have been waiting for me in my shelves for over a year now and it shall finally be their time to shine!  

I may have taken a lot on my plate, but the year is long and so are the pandemic and the restrictions, and that being said, let the reading begin!