CuppaTea

Last year I attempted Hannah Braime's Reading Challenge . Having completed (well, nearly)  that challenge, and having thoroughly appreciated exploring different genres and different titles from what I normally end up reading when driven purely by interest and mood and what I already know, I have decided to set myself a different challenge this year.

Now that 2017 has finished, I thought I'd update how I went with my reading challenge. Did I read 52 books in 2017? Well, that was never in any doubt of being achieved. Did I complete the challenge, though?

In January I shared a little about my determination to write a diary in Spanish . Surprisingly, I actually managed to write at least 100 words in Spanish every day last year!

Everything seems to be moving so rapidly now! Since my last update , when I was one book behind the schedule, I experienced a rapid completion of a few categories, and have now completed 20 out of the original 26 categories, and a total of 39 out of the complete list of 52. That is 75%! Although now I have less than 2 months to go and quite a few categories to complete! One of the books I read left me in the odd position of not liking the main character very much.

I had the house to myself at dinner time tonight, so I thought this would be the perfect time to attempt the 'dish of death' (according to Masterchef Australia), as no one else would suffer if I failed. I love risotto. I love the idea of it, I love the variety of flavours that may be included, but I have never attempted to make it before. And so I turned to a chef I trust to have wonderful recipes: Jamie Oliver.

So, now that June is ending, and we have reached the halfway point in the calendar, how far have I progressed with the 2017 Reading Challenge? Since my end of the first quarter update , I have been able to check off another 3 categories on the 26 book long list, including a self-published book. And when it came to reading a book with a character who has the same first name as me, wow! What an odd reading experience, seeing my own name on nearly every page in a book! Definitely a first for me. Which makes me wonder how people who have more common names than I do feel when they read a book with a character who shares their name. Are you used to it? Or is it still a bit odd?

I decided to attempt a new recipe just for my friend's birthday last week. Apparently lemon meringue pie is their favourite, so I got hold of the recipe the family usually uses, and gave it a try. The recipe had three parts: the pastry, the filling, and the meringue. I had been told it was a pretty easy recipe, or was I told that it was straightforward? Either way, I was expecting the newness to be hard, not following the recipe.

We all deal with pain differently, and we all respond differently to the pain of other people. I remember once sharing with a close friend about some of the things I was struggling with at work, and she responded to my pain with attempts to fix the problems. As a testament to how good our friendship is, I stopped her, and told her all I needed was for her to listen, to let me tell how I felt about the situation, because she couldn't help me 'fix' anything. As further proof of how good our friendship is, she did. Because I wonder how often I have had someone respond unhelpfully to my pain, and never said anything. I wonder how often I have deliberately chosen not to share my pain because I expect that the person's response will be unhelpful, perhaps even hurtful, even when they actually really want to help.

As you may have seen already, I have taken up a reading challenge for 2017 (if you haven't seen this, you can read the first post , second post , and third post about it), and I am thoroughly enjoying approaching reading in a different, more deliberate way. This has affected how I think about other things in life, which led to discussing with a friend recently the idea of setting a recipe challenge. And so, over the course of walking to, ordering, and eating at a wonderful Italian restaurant, we outlined a recipe challenge.

Nearly two months have passed, so I thought I'd write an update on my reading progress this year. When I last wrote , I had started a novel with nearly 1500 pages. I was pleasantly surprised that in the end it took less than two weeks to read the whole thing! And it held my attention the whole time - I didn't start reading anything else until I'd finished it. Since then, I have read one other novel for the reading challenge, bringing the total to 11, just shy of halfway for the 26 book challenge. And then I diverted to reading books just because they were there, or I felt like reading them, while waiting for a book to be available from the local public library.