Good Morning! Today is a glorious Thursday and tomorrow D and I leave to fly out to Manassas, VA for a week with his parents. I’m really excited to be going back to the DC area because there is just so much history there. I love seeing the old houses, battlefields and cemeteries. I look forward to seeing the family too since we rarely get to spend time with them. But I won’t be able to get past my book addiction even while I’m there.

I have a Goodreads account and I am so fastidious about it. I would say that I visit the website at least two or three times a day. I’m always marking the last book I read or adding to my ‘To Read List’. But Goodreads is something that I only discovered in April of this year. I immediately found the 2012 Reading Challenge and put in the number of books I would read before the end of this year. Because I have an OCD about numbers with the ending of 3,6 or 9, I set my goal as 199 books. I know it sounds like a lot but this, reading, is what I do (okay, I write too!) and it makes me pretty happy. So today is the 27 December 2012 and I have read 201 books for this year so far. I’m pretty happy with myself. I plan to set my goal for 2013 at 333. But before I get there I’d like to give myself another challenge, a 30 in 30 goal. For the next 30 days I will read the books from the list I will be building today.

So to show my extreme attentiveness to detail I will admit that my notebook, which I use as a day-to-day bible, contains lists of things to do, noting ideas for writing stories and a list of movies to be seen and books to read which are already on my kindle. From the 787 books to read I am picking this 30. Oh this is so exciting because until I start the list I won’t even know what they are…

Ali’s 30 in 30 list:

1. Neverending Story – Michael Ende
2. Dirt – K.F. Ridley
3. Fissure (The Patrick Chronicles) – Nicole Williams
4. A Note of Madness – Tabitha Suzuma
5. Always Been Mine (Moreno Brothers) – Elizabeth Reyes
6. V is for Virgin – Kelly Oram
7. Sold in Savannah (Pirates of Savannah) – Tarrin P. Lupo
8. This Beautiful Thing – Amanda Heath
9. Eve of Samhain (The Hanaford Park Series) – Lisa Sanchez
10. Pleasure Untold (The Hanaford Park Series) – Lisa Sanchez
11. The Underworld (Fallen Star Series) – Jessica Sorensen
12. Columbine – Dave Cullen
13. Ask the Passengers – A.S. King
14. The Kissing Booth – Beth Reekles
15. Touch of Death – Kelly Hashaway
16. Darkness Rising (Into the Shadows) – Karly Kirkpatrick
17. Pulse Papers (Pulse Series) – Kailin Gow
18. Blood Bond (Pulse Series) – Kailin Gow
19. The Edge of Never – A.M. Redmerski
20. Back When You Were Easier to Love – Emily Wing Smith
21. Tips on Having a Gay (Ex)Boyfriend – Carrie Jones
22. Love (and Other Uses for Duct Tape) – Carrie Jones
23. I Kissed a Zombie, And I Liked It – Adam Selzer
24. Article 5 – Kristen Simmons
25. A Trip to the Stars: A Novel – Nicholas Christopher 
26. The Space Between – Brenna Yavanoff
27. Everything Forbidden – Jess Michaels
28. Warm Bodies – Isaac Marion
29. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkein
30. Fast Times in Palestine – Pamela J. Olsen

There it is, my list. I plan to do some book reviews of some of these books. A lot of them are Young Adult, which is what I really read a lot of. I know I’ve been badly educated not having read The Hobbit yet. I’ll be fixing that within the next month. I’m going to ride this all out and see how it goes. Maybe you can make your own list, a shorter list, and see how many you can read.