One thing that I really appreciate about having a blog is having a concrete place to keep track of my reading goals for the year. If you’re curious, here is my list from last year, and here is my yearly wrap-up, where I reflected on how I did on those goals (spoiler alert: they did not go well).
Read 150 books
This is the same reading goal as I had last year; although I surpassed it (reaching 175 books), I decided that, since I’ll be starting college and I don’t know what my summer plans are and such, it was probably better to keep it at the same level rather than raising it.
Read more books on my physical TBR
I quite literally just made an Excel sheet with all of the books that I own and haven’t read, and it is… an embarrassingly large amount. I’m definitely going to try and cut down on it a lot this year by reading fewer library ebooks (my new Kindle might not help with that goal though).
I’ve also joined a ton of StoryGraph challenges centered around reading off of your TBR to try and encourage myself to work on this goal and offer a sort of benchmark.
Blog consistently
I have enough posts planned to last me to August, and I’m feeling like I’m in a pretty good rhythm with blogging, so hopefully this will be pretty doable.
Review more books
A goal last year was to review every book that I read on Goodreads, which didn’t even kind of happen, so I’m not trying that again this year. Instead, I’m aiming just to review a greater proportion of my books. One thing that’s really been helping with that recently has been reading eARCs from NetGalley; by having to write reviews for those books, I then feel more ready to write reviews for other books I read because I’m already in the flow of it. Thus, this goal also seems doable. I’ve already been making good progress; I’ve reviewed all four books that I’ve read this year, only one of which was an ARC.
Find a way to make Bookstagram work better for me
I love the Bookstagram community and the artistic aspect of it, but I’ve really been having issues finding the motivation to post consistently on there, so I’m trying to think of ways to adapt the process to make it easier and more fun for me. I’m considering such aspects as intermingling bookish art, such as fanart or quotes, that I make in with my other posts, since art is a lot more fun for me than taking photos of books.
Read more fantasy than contemporary
For the past two years, I’ve read a handful more contemporary books than fantasy books. This isn’t because I like contemporary more, or that I see more contemporary books that appeal to me, but simply because those are the most readily available ebooks from my public library and they’re a bit addicting, so I read them even if I’m not enjoying much. Since fantasy is my favorite genre, and I tend to enjoy it a lot more than contemporary, I really want to make a conscious effort to read more of it than of the latter.
Finish reading all the Jane Austen books
This was a goal for last year that I didn’t finish. I just need to read Emma, Mansfield Park, and Love and Freindship to finish. Ideally I’d like to reread the rest of the books this year too, but we’ll see what happens.
Read at least 5 Shakespeare plays
My goal last year was 3 Shakespeare plays, but I’m upping it. For one thing, I’m taking a Shakespeare class for English this year, so I already know I’ll read 3-4 plays this semester, which would accomplish the previous goal in itself (as it did last year), but doesn’t seem like it’s much of an accomplishment on my end.
Read at least 1 book in French
My goal last year was two books in French, and I ended up not reading any, so I’m lowering the bar. Even if it’s just rereading Le Petit Prince, I really want to do this.
Read at least 5 translated books
This was a goal last year, but I only got to 3/5, so I’m trying again. Ideally 3 of them will be the second, third, and fourth books of the Mirror Visitor Quartet, and one of them will be Anna Karenina, but we’ll see.
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