1AlisonY
Welcome friends, old and new, to my 2025 thread. If we've not met before, I live in the outskirts of a village around 4 miles from the suburbs of Belfast, Northern Ireland. I work in health tech and am mum to two teenagers. My working life is demanding with long hours, and as well as reading I unwind by doing strength and conditioning gym training a few evenings each week.
I can't believe that this is my 10th year as a member of CR, and what a wonderful ten years of reading you have all encouraged in me. When I opened up my first thread back in 2015, my goal was to start reading regularly again and I had a set list of books which I wanted to work my way through. In subsequent years my reading has become more fluid and I prefer to go where the reading winds take me. Like a magpie I can be drawn to a shiny new cover in a mainstream bookshop, a random book might speak to me in a secondhand shop, or an article somewhere can spark a random interest in something I want to find out more about. And of course, I've discovered many new authors and titles through Club Read and accounts I follow in other groups on LT.
Fiction-wise I tend to stay in the lane of literary fiction. I also enjoy a good memoir - not necessarily of particularly famous people, but more of people who have done interesting things. In recent years at least a third of my reading in the year will fall into the non-fiction category, ranging from personal development to science to art / design. Over the last few years a few books of poetry usually slip in somewhere too.
In recent years I've become more and more drawn to the arts in general, and it's becoming something increasingly important to me to make time for. In 2025, I hope to plan in some more artistic pursuits, including getting back to writing more myself.
