My reflection on the past twelve months will be a bit different from the one, I´ve done last time around this time of a year. 2017 has turned out to be a year I am glad that it will be over in a few hours. Like every year as soon as December arrives, people go nuts. Christmas Eve is coming, presents need to be bought or created and as soon as the first snow is falling, the chaos is perfect.
From the so often praised festive spirit or the special time of a year, the fifth season, so to speak, I didn´t get much this year. Until Christmas Eve I had no lights, no Advent wreath, or decoration up not to mention a Christmas tree. And if you were looking for an Advents calendar, you are definitely looking in the wrong place too. I just wasn´t in the mood for all that.
2017 was in some ways a very changing year – and not all changes were good ones. We got bad medical news to deal with, and it soon became a very costly year when I had to replace some of my technical equipment.
In other areas, I had to face and deal with a really bad situation that got worse from day to day and ended up me leaving a reviewer-team I had been a part for almost ten years. To see how a once-great team got more and more turned into one not so great was hard.
Sure, I haven´t read fewer books as some feared I would. To speak in numbers, I read one-hundred-and-fourteen (in numbers 114) books in total - three more as in the year before. Seventy-six of them new releases. And almost all of them were given to me by publishers. Some I bought myself, won some in giveaways and others I got while participating in various reading challenges. There was never a lack of books and I am sure that in 2018 I won´t have a lack of them either (peeking over at her huge pile of books).
I already have some pre-ordered and today I just expanded my reading-list with titles I am sure I will get one way or the other.
My blog got renamed, I changed the design or better said the look of my reviews and got more and more active on Twitter. My follower number there is now up to one-hundred-and-twenty-three (in numbers 123), tripled in fact during 2017 and on Instagram, the number is rising as well. Don´t worry, I won´t present more numbers here. But as it turns out, I started loving to write tweets. In fact, more than doing posts on Facebook (maybe that´s why I´m kind of struggling there), and though I am not posting two or three times a day pictures on Instagram, I kind of enjoy taking them and edit them a bit. Yes, other bloggers do much better growing their followers no matter where on social media, but I am happy with the numbers I have right now and think that they will keep raise in the new year.
I learned many new things, some of them good ones, others not. And during the course of the year, I found out who are real friends, and who isn´t. Not very pleasant, but okay It is their loss, not mine.
Though 2018 will be a bit of a sad year in some ways since my family will mark towards the end the 10th anniversary of the death of a beloved family member and my father is coping with his illness, I am sure that it will be a better one as the past one. At least I am trying to see it that way.
Blog related I will take part in two challenges, the 2018 New Release Challenge and the Beat The Backlist Challenge. Besides them, I will continue to do the Waiting On Wednesday and am planning on doing the Stacking The Shelves again. But that´s not sure yet. And maybe I participate in the one or the other challenge along the way besides those I already signed-up for. We´ll see.
Yes, many changes and challenges are laying behind me and new ones I am sure are ahead of me. At the end of the year, I can say that I am looking forward to 2018. Because as I see it: It can´t go any worse.
Happy New Year - we see us in 2018
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