December Decimation Final Recap

There was no December Decimation recap post on Monday for two reasons: firstly, I took a few days off blogging for Christmas, and secondly, I actually went an entire week without reading anything! I was very busy with writing and family, and I genuinely didn’t pick a book up for a week, which is very rare for me. It did leave me needing to pack the last nine books of the decimation challenge into this last week of the year, so here’s my final recap – I didn’t quite make it to the end of my thirty books, but I achieved a very respectable twenty-five (plus plenty of others that weren’t in the challenge)!

December Decimation Recap: Week 3

The third week of December is finished, so it’s time to check in with my decimation TBR – so far I’m at 21/30 books! Let’s take a look at what I managed to read this week.

December Decimation Recap: Week 2

Two weeks of my December challenge are done! I keep feeling like I should be further through the list, but I’m actually making perfectly good progress. And I have to remind myself I have been reading some things from outside the list too! Anyway, let’s take a look at what I read this week…

December Decimation Recap: Week One

I thought for the time being I’d replace my Monday TBR Spotlight posts with a little recap of how I’m getting on with my December Decimation project and some mini-reviews of each book. Hopefully it will keep me accountable! If you missed the introduction post, you can catch up here.

I feel like I’m off to a good start, especially the first week of December wasn’t quite a whole week. So far I’ve read six books, and made progress on a seventh:

December Decimation

I’ve been making such great strides with my TBR lately, but I’m a mood reader at heart, so there are flaws in any method I use to choose my next read. Keeping up to date with new releases means the oldest books on the list languish unread for years; but focusing on the books that have sat there the longest means I don’t get to recently acquired books until they’re old too!

So I’m trying something different – I’m going to decimate my TBR. I know ‘decimate’ is usually just used now to mean ‘do a lot of damage to’, but it actually comes from an Ancient Roman punishment: soldiers were split into groups of ten and one from every ten was executed. Reading will be a little more joyful and a little less execution-y, of course, but the plan is to pick one book out of every 10 on my list, making a shorter TBR that’s perfectly evenly spread across old books and new.

Since my TBR is now down to 300, a tenth is just 30 books, which is definitely doable for me in a month! Want to see what I picked and why?