In an effort to be more active on the site, and considering the one thread in which I post consistently is the Reading Challenge one, I thought I'd start a blog series about my adventures in reading! I wanted to share some of my love for organising and categorisation, and considering how strong some of y'all's spreadsheet games are, this place is perfect.

I tracked my reading intermittently from circa 2009, and with serious commitment since 2012 when I opened a Goodreads account. Tracking and logging is my jam! I cannot count the amount of hours I've spent in my life cataloguing and re-cataloguing different aspects of my life. This year, I gave Book Riot's reading log (A) a whirl, and so far, I have enjoyed it! Since my spreadsheet skills are next to nonexistent, I have only customised it to my needs on the most basic of levels, and thus, learnt to adapt the rest of my logging habits to it. The log allows you to log so many things about your reading habits, from form, to format, to the source of your reading material. It also allows you to keep track of diversity in your reading habits. Over the next several posts, I shall discuss my triumphs and trials with different aspects of this reading log. For this first installment, I'll stick to discussing my January reading adventures.

January was an interesting time for me. I returned from an overseas holiday on New Year's Day, and immediately started to feel anxious about my ever-growing pull list of comics issues - something with which I have been behind since October 2018. However, one week in, I began full-time work for the first time in my life in a job for which I'd been training for the past four years. Being a doctor has been in many ways what I expected, but also not. In January, when COVID was but a mere rumour here in Australia, the entire nation's focus was on the bushfire crisis. I learnt on my first day of orientation that my first rotation as a newly minted intern would be in a town that was at the fire line of this devastating natural disaster.

Thankfully, the bushfires affected my professional life in a rather superficial way. In January, the challenges of internship were myriad, but did not include a crash course in natural disaster medicine. Of course, the lives of many of the staff and patients at that hospital were forever changed by the fires, and they are never far from my thoughts.

Now, onto the reading stats!

A total of 65 reads started, and 63 finished! And none marked as "did not finish" (DNF)!  The reads that I started and have yet to finish are:

• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Illustrated Edition - JK Rowling & illus. by Jim Kay (started in 2019)
• Your Perfect Year - Charlotte Lucas & trans. by Alison Layland (I think when I return to this book, I'll likely mark it as DNF...)