The Chronological Sherlock Holmes Challenge

Duration: 1 January 2017 to 21 April 2018

Host: Noonlight Reads
Challenge Rules and Sign-Up Page

The Challenge: Read all 56 short stories and four novels of Sherlock Holmes in chronological order.

For Christmas this year my wife bought me a complete anthology of the Sherlock Holmes tales, almost all of which I have never read. Sad, I know! So, I searched online a bit to find the best order to read the stories or whether I just plunge into the book the way it's laid out. I stumbled upon the Chronological Sherlock Holmes Challenge.

The host blog Noonlight Reads laid out a nice timeline to schedule a purposeful and breathable way to read all of the stories and be able to discuss them weekly. I like her approach, and I think it will certainly aid in my reading goal.

Be sure to visit the links above and see more about the challenge.

I'm looking forward to seeing this one through to its completion.

2016 Blog in Review

Hi there.

I took a 2016 leave of absence from the blog, but I read so many new books. Ironic, no?

Granted, most of those were books read to or with our son, but it impressed my GoodReads challenge for 2016.

I'm very likely to take a leave of absence for 2017 as well. This will be the third year in a row of being a tax preparer on top of my regular full-time job and in addition to home life, so reading and writing about reading will likely be a low priority. It's still something I very much want to do, but at some point things will have to ease up somewhere in my life for that to happen.

Or I need to re-prioritize things that I do in my spare time.

I mean, do I really need to stare at my phone for 2 hours after the kid goes to bed before I go to bed?

Anyway, my wife got me some very interesting books to read for Christmas, 2 of them sort of by request and one that I didn't even know existed that she surprised me with. I'm looking forward to those and also increasing our son's reading list. We read over 100 books together last year, plus he started school this fall. I can't wait for us to start going back to the library again and restarting our regular routine of book-borrowing and reading. 

Have a great 2017!

Book Review: The First Horror by RL Stine

The First Horror
by RL Stine

Publisher: Simon Pulse
Series: 99 Fear Street: The House of Evil #1
Release Date: 1 August 1994
ISBN: 0671885626

Format: Paperback
Pages: 148
Genre: YA/Horror
Time to read: 2 hours
Source: Craiglist
aStore Link (Real Book): The First Horror
aStore Link (Kindle Book): The First Horror




Summary
(source: Goodreads)

The Scariest Address of All

Twin sisters Cally and Kody Frasier aren’t thrilled that their family has moved to Fear Street. They’ve heard the strange stories. They know about the centuries of nightmarish terror. But what they don't know is that they’ve moved into the one house that even their neighbors on Fear Street are afraid to enter. The house that has stood mysteriously empty for the past thirty years. They moved to 99 Fear Street.

Now they must learn the secret of 99 Fear Street or they will become the next victims of the house of evil.

My Reaction


Having grown up with and only ever read Stine's Goosebumps series, I was completely surprised by the writing style in this first of the 99 Fear Street: House of Evil series. I had no idea the author of the light-hearted spooky stories that enthralled me as a preteen was capable of such horrifying imagery and downright terrifying undertones as I just discovered as an adult in this book. I'm a bit regretful that I put off reading his non-Goosebumps tales for so long.

This book still had a lot of the same elements one comes to expect from Stine's voice: unfulfilling end-of-chapter cliffhangers, references to brand names, faulty leaps of logic, et al. But unlike what I'm used to, there's an actual romantic story arc and a point at which I thought I knew where the story was headed, but then it went so much farther.

I simply have to find the other two books in this series. Though some references are a little dated reading them now, once I grew accustomed to the setting, I was sucked right into this story.

For more information on this book:

Amazon  |  Kindle

2015 Blog in Review

2015 is in the books, and I (surprisingly) was a bit more into the books this year than last. This despite becoming a tax preparer as a second job and doing all the other things I did that at this point I don't remember. But it was a busy year, indeed.

One of my most exciting adventures this year, though, was taking our son to the library for the very first time and getting his own library card! He absolutely loves going, and we try to go every two weeks on Fridays when I'm typically off work. Apparently reading the books to him and being in the library regularly has similarly stimulated my reading fervor a bit more, so I feel like I've read more in latter 2015 than the years coming up to it.

Another exciting development was beginning to teach the five-year-old how to read beginning around October using the aptly named Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. I found this on Amazon at some point and kind of held onto to it until I could get a feel of when he was ready to start learning. I must have hit it right at the right time, because we got through it pretty quickly and caught on to a lot of things fast. We had anticipated completing it by the end of 2015, but holidays, two weeks of sickness, and a week of winter VBS got in the way. However, we should be finished in about a week now and ready to grow into newer reading lessons from there.

Back to the blog, I wrote last year that I had not found a routine that works for me in reading, reviewing, blogging, etc. I've been frustrated the past few years of trying, and I think that's because I don't have a lot of time it seems. Also, I always seem to be heavy into it until about February and then I don't get back into it again til the next January. And here we are.

Instead of getting frustrated this time, though, I'm just going to do what I can when I can do it. This is mostly just an exercise in writing and putting my voice out there to the random people who land on these pages from Google. :)

I still can't review a book to save my life.

In tracking my reading on GoodReads this year, I included all the books I read to the boy for records' sake, but I didn't include it in my reading accomplishments. I'm sure there's a challenge out there for which all of those books would qualify.

Finally, I failed reading the Bible in a year, even worse than last year. I credit this to working in the evenings as a tax preparer through the end of tax season. The same thing will happen this year as I attempt to make extra money to pay off some stuff, which is going swimmingly by the way. I didn't even attempt starting the Bible in a Year for this year because I knew I'd get derailed when tax season begins (which should be soon).

Challenge Updates:

• Bible in a Year: I read 182 out of 1189 chapters, which is only 15.3% of the entire Bible. I made it to 25.7% in 2014.
• 2015 Authors A to Z Reading Challenge: I read 10 out of 26 authors (not counting the child's books). That's actually pretty good for me. :) I only reviewed 6 of those.
• 2015 eBook Reading Challenge: I actually read 6 eBooks to just exceed my goal of 5! Of course I only reviewed 1/2 of them.

I may forgo challenges this year for lack of time. However 2017 I should hopefully have more time to pay more attention to what I read. And maybe I'll find a challenge I can actually do this year. I want to jump on that bandwagon so hard.

LeviSamJuno