Whatever happened to those 12 books?

On January 4th, 2020, I posted a post on 12 English books to read in 2020. At the same time, I picked 12 books in Swedish ones too. This was the third time I chose a given set of books to read, as a way to actually read those unread books already in my possession.

For the first time, I did  n o t  follow through.

I read ten of the English, ten of the Swedish, leaving two + two unread, and those I just might donate/give away, because even though they spoke to me at the beginning of 2020, they sure didn’t for the duration of the year, and still don’t. On the other hand, two of the books I did read were really good, and I’ve already started to reread Women Who Run With the Wolves, because it is simply that good. Being Wrong is also a book I know I will reread in years to come.

Given how good I am at living up to internal (as well as external) expectations, you might be entertaining questions such as:

What happened to her, why didn’t she follow through?

She’s loosing it, isn’t she? I mean, she couldn’t even live up to this publicly displayed reading challenge. 

Or, for that matter, you might be thinking:

Oh. My. God. She’s human, after all! 

She must be feeling so upset at not living up to this promise!

The thing is, I neither feel I am loosing it, nor do I feel upset. Not even close. On the contrary.
My strong Upholder-tendency is simply being tempered, fine-tuned, used by me with more discernment, specifically what to let go of, even though it might be something that’s served me in the past. If it doesn’t any more, it’s Bye Bye! So if anything, that’s what happened.

The fact that I can temper this tendency, and that I should temper it, might be one of the more important lessons I grasped in 2020. So for this year, I haven’t, and won’t, do a repeat of this practice. I do have an intention to reread books in 2021 though, books that have made a big impact in me, for any number of reasons. And even though I shot way past my Goodreads reading challenge of reading 65 books last year (I read 88), I set the same target, 65 books in 2021.