I'm Reading Comeeks

Happy New Year!  

So, I failed my goal this year.  By a lot.  I only read about 250 some comic books.  I missed the mark by over 100 comics!  I'm not going to say that the challenge was impossible.  I think reading a comic a day and ending up with 365 is not only doable, but probably surpassable.  I bet many people read more than 500 comics a year.  

I just don't think I can be one of them.  Even when I had a month where I did manage to fill every day with reads and reviews I got really burnt out on it.  Everything suffered, my reading, my writing, my thinking, until I just stopped everything altogether and went into stagnant mode.

Some of the comics I reviewed were lovely and some were truly awful, but the more I read the less I was able to enjoy those wonderful comics.  I started to see reading as a chore rather than a challenge and that's not a good way to approach books.

I still have stacks and stacks of comic books everywhere, which became a problem in itself.  Even a thin comic (which of course, not all of them are) can become daunting when it's in a stack of 20 other comics, graphic novels, and other books, all demanding attention.

I had to set up a folding table to hold all of the books.  In December I dismantled the table as part of my New Years plan to reduce the amount of books I have checked out at a time.  So far this has meant that instead of having a table full of books, I now have stacks of books on other various surfaces.  Despite the fact that I made a concentrated effort to read it all and get rid of it all, each time I made the trip to the library to return a stack, there were more waiting to be picked up.

It seemed like for every book I returned there were two waiting to be brought home.  Even now I have a total of 72 books checked out and 75 books requested at the library.  This is actually a vast improvement from a month ago.  I even returned some books unread!  Gasp!

Anyway, I'm thinking a new challenge is in order for 2016.  I'm still going to be reading comics, obviously, I still have a crap ton sitting waiting to be read.  I will still do my best to review them, but I'm not going to task myself with writing reviews for every comic I read or doing a daily update, sorry!  Instead, I hope to make something a little less slap dash, even if it ends up being less often.

What I've come up with instead is going in a slightly different direction.  I hope to update with that new goal (which is still a challenge, but hopefully one that won't drive me as crazy as this year of immersive comic reading) later in the day. 

Until then, happy reading.