Mid-Year Reading Progress Post

Though this is my first year doing the Book Blog Discussion Challenge, I have been writing one of these posts each year around this time.

So far I have completed four of my year-long reading challenges. 

Alphabet Soup:

This was the first one done this year, at the end of May. Some letters were tricky! It took me to the very end to find a J title. A friend was about to donate the book listed, but I wanted to read it. 

RAD:

A short one, with only nine categories. I got this done just two weeks ago, with one square left. 

Blydyn Square Books:

I unexpectedly got this one done quickly. I was just one book short, but quickly found one that worked for the one prompt remaining. 

Alphabet Soup Authors Edition:

I've been doing the Alphabet Soup for titles for several years now, but only this year did I decide to do the Alphabet Soup for Authors. The last two letters I got were U and Y, pretty tricky for an author's name.  I still can't believe I found one with X in the name, though I knew about the author already.

I've always seemed to complete the Color Coded and the What's in a Name? challenges before the end of June, in time for when I write this post. But that was not the case this year. Yellow and brown have often seemed hard to find when doing this challenge, but that was even more true this year. A title with "brown" (or any shade of brown, such as chocolate) is the last one I need to finish this challenge. As for the "footwear" category (What's in a Name?), I have something planned for that for next month, but I'm stuck on the "NFL team" one! I keep looking for titles containing "eagles" or "cowboys," the two team names that keep coming to my mind (I'm not a sports person!) Any title suggestions for any of these?

So far I have read 113 books as of today. This is fewer compared to the last few years at this point in the year. Kind of surprising. I'm currently reading one that is over 1400 pages. That being true, I probably won't attempt too many other long books for the rest of this year, at least not any in the 1000+ page range. Maybe 500 pages or below, depending on my mood. I was looking in my library's database for a book set in Australia or New Zealand for next month, but the first one I found is over 800 pages! Not sure I want to jump into something that long so soon after a 1400+ pager! That would be quite a lot!