I know you all have been flooded by this type of posts in the last few days, but it’s that time of the year. We all just have to bear it with dignity and write our own post on the best books and our plans 😉

As always I just could not decide on a top 10, so here’s my top 11. It’s a mixed bag, just as my reading this year was varied and also included a lot more non-fiction than usually:

Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold – Stephen Fry (r)
The Right Amount of Panic: How women trade freedom for safety – F. Vera-Gray (r)
Levels of Life – Julian Barnes (r)
The Bookseller of Kabul – Asne Seierstad (r)
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – Milan Kundera (r)
This Is Going To Hurt – Adam Kay (r)
The Absolute at Large – Karel Capek (r)
A Gentleman in Moscow – Amor Towles (r)
The Solace of Open Spaces – Gretel Ehrlich (r)
Rzeczy, których nie wyrzuciłem – Marcin Wicha (r)
The Power – Naomi Alderman (r)

What do I plan for 2019?

I’m thinking of maybe creating a short formal TBR, but this will have to wait until we move to a new apartment in mid-January, only after unpacking and arranging all the books on the shelves I’ll be able to decide what will go on the TBR.

I definitely proved to myself that I find it difficult to stick to a challenge that requires me to complete something at regular intervals, especially if it’s monthly. Also, the 12 bookshops for 12 months challenge nearly bankrupted me, so in 2019 I’ll go for a quarterly bookshop-crawl, but I’ll try to stick to second-hand bookshops. Better for the environment and my wallet. I still have to come up with the tagline for this project, if you have any ideas please add them in the comments. ‘Quarterly Second-Hand Bookshop Crawl‘ seems a bit of a mouthful.

Another thing I discovered is that I started shying away from reading long books, by which I mean books over 400 pages. I just avoid looking at them on my bookshelves. I’m dreading spending two weeks with a book I don’t like (and I really rarely do not finish books). Therefore, I decided to only buy books under 350 pages in 2019. I know, it does not get more shallow than that, but what’s the point of me buying the book and never reading it. I hope an offshoot of this decision will be a diminished fear of long book (should it be a FOLB?) which will help me to tackle at least a few of those already lingering at home.

I do want to stick to at least one Polish book a month, which just as last year should be an easy thing to achieve. I also plan to join #20booksofsummer this year as well, I don’t treat it as a challenge anymore, it’s becoming a habit.

So those are my not overly ambitious plans. There is also one hope I have, I hope to regain the ability to immerse myself in a book, that I seem to have lost in the second half of the year.