I have utterly failed in my decision to slow down the pace of my reading. Here's what I've read since the new year began, with links to reviews when I wrote one:

1. The Mermaid's Madness by Jim C Hines
2. Misery by Stephen King
3. Once Bitten, Twice Shy by Jennifer Rardin
4. Jane Austen Ruined My Life by Beth Patillo
5. Ash by Malinda Lo
6. The Second Shift by Arlie Russell Hochschild
7. Feed by MT Anderson
8. The Love Letter by Cathleen Schine
9. Belle de Jour by Anonymous
10. Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld
11. Skinned by Robin Wasserman
12. Picking Bones from Ash by Marie Mutsuki Mockett
13. Hard Love by Ellen Wittlinger
14. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
15. The Gates by John Connolly
16. The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards
17. The Secret Hour by Scott Westerfeld
18. Columbine by Dave Cullen
19. Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale
20. Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
21. Children of the Waters by Carleen Brice


Genre Breakdown

There's a lot of overlap in genre classifications. For the sake of convenience, I count YA as a separate set of genres, so YA fantasy doesn't hang out with adult fantasy (not THAT kind, you gutter-minded people) and so on. So, the genres represented in this list:

Fantasy (1), Horror (1), Contemporary Fantasy (2)*, Realistic/literary fiction (5), YA fantasy (3)**, YA science fiction (2), YA contemporary fantasy (1), YA realistic/lit fic (1), Nonfiction (3), Other (2)***

*I included The Gates, which is a bizarre book that can't make up its mind about what age it's geared toward, but was enjoyable nonetheless.
**I put Leviathan in this category, because I'm too lazy to make a new section in my spreadsheet for steampunk or historical fantasy or psuedo-scientific whatever-the-hells.
***I'm really not sure where to stick the Lewis Carroll books.

Why I Read It/Where I Heard About It

I've decided to try to track how I find out about books. Now, it's not quite "how I choose books" because I hear about more books than I read, and hear about plenty I decide I don't WANT to read, and I'm not delving into that quite yet. Unsurprisingly, I heard of the vast majority of books from recommendations and reviews on blogs this month. Part of that is because at the beginning of the month, I surfed through all the blogs I follow and a number I don't and made up a huge list, so this trend may peter out over the rest of the year. But here are all the methods I used to find books, or perhaps that books used to find me:

Sequel/known author (4), Cover (1)*, Blog recs and reviews (10), School assignment (1), Group pick (2)**, Can't remember (2), Totally random (1)***

*Just means the cover caught my eye a few times so I finally picked it up.
**A trio of friends and I have been spending our weekends reading books out loud to each other.
***I needed another lit fic book to keep up my 25% goal for the year, so I picked a truly random one off the family shelf.