2019 Reading And Blogging Goals V

At the beginning of the year I posted about my 2019 Reading And Blogging Goals. I listed ten things I wanted to do this year. Wow ten. I didn’t realize it was that many until I counted it. Huh. Anyway, I listed ten things I hope to accomplish this year:

• Get caught up on my reviews
• Open the blog to review requests again
• Read more Self-pub/Indie Books
• Another Self-pub Fantasy Month?
• Finish up series I’ve started
• Dragonlance
• Warhammer 40K
• Star Wars
• Clean up the blog
• Reduce the size of my TBR

Because this isn’t simply a book review blog (I mean mostly yeah but not completely), it’s also my thoughts on books and reading and the blog in general, I’ve decided to take some time to address each one in more detail because I know you’re all riveted by it. OK, truth be told this is really to help me keep on task. Anyway, here’s the fifth deeper dive into my goals.

Astute readers will notice I didn’t post anything with a title of Reading And Blogging Goals IV. This is because the goal of opening up the blog to review requests again I accomplished before getting around to writing about it as a goal. So it didn’t happen with the title format of the rest of these posts.

And I’m still going out of order…

DRAGONLANCE

If you’ve followed me closely you’ll know I love the Dragonlance series. These are the books I credit with getting me into reading fantasy when I was in middle school back in the early 90’s.

For those of you who’ve never read them, Dragonlance is a series of books set in the world of Krynn, and based on the Dungeons & Dragons setting of the same name. Authors Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman kicked everything off in 1984 with The Chronicles books:

• Dragons of Autumn Twilight
• Dragons of Winter Night
• Dragons of Spring Dawning

“Dragons. Creatures of legend. Stories told to children. But now dragons have returned to Krynn.”

The Chronicles follow the exploits of a group of friends who have come back together after years apart amid rumors of war in a world the gods have abandoned; a world where dragons have returned.

Weiss and Hickman followed the Chronicles up with the Legends series:

• Time of The Twins
• War of The Twins
• Test of The Twins

This series largely follows the story of two of the main characters from Chronicles, the twins Raistlin Majere and Caramon Majere. Between these six books Raistlin became my favorite character in fantasy literature for years to come, and he still ranks up there on my list even if it’s only nostalgia keeping him there.

After Legends other authors were brought in to expand upon the original stories and many more series were birthed. I devoured a bunch of these books as a teenager, re-read Chronicles as a young adult, and accumulated a small collection.

It’s now been close to 20 years since I read a Dragonlance book however and I REALLY REALLY REALLY want to read them again. I also want to eventually finish off the entire series. That’s a daunting task as according to one website I found there are apparently over 190 titles in the series.

Which finally brings me around to the point of this post. This year I want to start the long process of reading the entire Dragonlance series. I know I won’t complete this goal in 2019. There’s just no way even if all I read was Dragonlance books. This is a very long term goal. For 2019 I want to start Chronicles again and maybe finish that first trilogy. I tweeted something about it a couple months ago and there was a handful of people who were possibly interested in reading them again too and maybe doing a read along.

So really this is a two-part goal:

• Start the Chronicles series again
• Maybe do a read along of Dragons of Autumn Twilight

I’ve been looking at my reading schedule and the calendar for the year trying to decide when to start Dragons of Autumn Twilight. I thought maybe I’d wait until November as it would fit the autumn theme, and then I could read Dragons of Winter Night in December or January (sticking with the theme) and then Dragons of Spring Dawning come March 2020. I like the seasonal theme for that but it’s putting it all off a long time. I also thought if there are people who really wanted to participate in a read along that I might want to get some idea of their schedule and what might work best.

So…what I’d like to know from all of you is whether you’d like to participate in a read along of Dragons of Autumn Twilight, and whether November is a good month for you or if you’d like to start sooner. If enough people are interested and want to read it sooner I may just move it up on the schedule. October is out, as that month I’m devoting to the horror genre for Halloween. September is a question mark in case I decide to do Self-Published Fantasy Month again that month (look for that in a later post in this series).

What do you think? Let me know in the comments below or over on Twitter and I’ll post a follow-up. Oh…and if you’re looking up the books on Goodreads or Amazon or anywhere else, the images I posted above are the original covers not the new ones so don’t worry if you can’t find the above outside of a used book store.

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