December and 2011 in Review

I had a busy December – which is sort of a weird concept since I left my job in early-to-middle November. I spent part of my day job hunting and the other part working on other projects. You’d think that with extra time I’d have written more reviews… well, to be honest, I haven’t felt motivated at all to write reviews. It has been a struggle to write any (I also had a lot of family chaos in December that was out of the ordinary, so that hurt the motivation/energy). Today, for the first time in weeks, I feel like writing. I’m hoping to keep the feeling going and that a few changes coming to Cookies, Books and Bikes are welcome.

Changes? Yep. This past fall I attempted to reduce the amount of sugar in my diet. It sort of takes the fun out of making cookies. I still make them once in a while, but I won’t be posting cookie recipes consistently, instead I hope to present other cooking/baking creativity on my blog. I’ve been baking a lot of breads and other foods so I’d like to be free to post those items when I’d like.

Other changes include occasional posts on other things going on with my hobbies. I design jewelry and crochet in my spare time too (which is where massive amounts of my time this holiday season was spent). I’d like to post about projects within those two fields or anything else I come up with.

As always, this is a book blog first and foremost. I hope to get my Random Books from the Bookshelf back on schedule and will be introducing a new feature focused on old book reviews I’ve written prior to my blog. Book Review Flashbacks will be a feature of short book reviews that I wrote in 2009. I hope it only appears once a week and that I can eventually phase it out as I get back into a book review writing groove. I have trying to set a goal for myself of four posts a week. If things go well, I may go back up to having something every day but I don’t want to even think about it at this point. I’d just like to get back to writing reviews because I love it. I love sharing my joy/frustration about books.

Due to massive amounts of time spent working on crocheting projects for the holidays, I didn’t read a great many books in December. I listened to quite a few, which includes:

In the Garden of Iden by Kage Baker

The Rose Labyrinth by Titania Hardie

Rosemary and Rue by Seanan McGuire

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

Hogfather by Terry Pratchett

The Dog Who Knew Too Much by Spencer Quinn

Dooms Day Book by Connie Willis

Duet by Kimberley Freeman

The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett

A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett

I read a pitiful four books, including:

Heartless by Gail Carriger

The Duke is Mine by Eloise James

Spider’s Bite by Jennifer Estep

Hounded by Kevin Hearne

I had a sort of time-travel, historical thing going with some of my audiobooks. In the Garden of Iden, The Eyre Affair and Dooms Day Book all had some sort of historical aspect to them. I enjoyed all of them. I think the book I enjoyed the least the entire month was The Rose Labyrinth. It was too slow at points. The Terry Pratchett books were all re-listens and if you’ve never read the Tiffany Aching series, I highly recommend it! They are all wonderful. Spider’s Bite and Hounded were excellent. I enjoyed Heartless and found it at times better then the previous book but it didn’t blow me away.

Those are my fourteen books for December. I ended the year at 184 – which is good. I wanted to read less then I read last year so I hit my goal.

How was your reading year/month? Did you read anything great for December that is new? I haven’t been keeping up with new releases since I’ve been focused on other things so I’d love to hear about what you read!