We all know about reading slumps and we all know how awful they are. Sometimes they come when you just don’t feel like reading, and sometimes it’s because you simply can’t find anything good to read. In 2013, for me, it was the latter. The entire year.

It wasn’t necessarily that I didn’t read anything good. Of the 75 books I read, I only disliked 9, and a further 14 were just so-so. That leaves 52 – more than 2/3rds of my list – that were good books. Just…none of them were great books. No blow-me-away books. I read a great book – Shadow and Bone – right at the end of 2012, and the next great book I read (other than rereads, which I escaped to at the end of 2013 just to have SOME great books) was A Game of Thrones in Jan 2014.

So my reading memories in 2013 revolve not around the great books I read, and instead around events. The Chopin Manuscript comes to mind when I think about my first 10K in January that year. The Rithmatist makes me think of the weeks Jason and I were reading books aloud to our boys that summer. I remember our cruise when I think of Beautiful Creatures, and associate the giant puzzle I put together that spring with the hours and hours I spent listening to Les Miserables. That year’s RIP was dominated by Gail Carriger, and December was almost all rereads of old favorites.

I didn’t blog (publicly) for most of 2013. In March that year, I moved all my reviews to a private journal and deleted them off GoodReads and any other location they might have been at the time. It was something I needed to do for my mental sanity, and eventually allowed me to fully return to book blogging here at The Zen Leaf. So in a way, 2013 was a really productive and healthy year for me, even if I didn’t have any super fantastic raving kinds of books. And I suppose, it’s helpful that I didn’t have any of those books in a year when I didn’t have a public place to squee about them anyway.

Having said that, I was really thankful to leave that year-long slump behind when 2014 came around. Seriously. Because reading slumps should never last that long. Oy.