2023 Bookish Goals! 🎯

The new year is almost upon us! How on earth has it gone so fast?! And this means that it’s time to think about my bookish year and how I want it to shape up. I’ve set myself some goals and tasks, as well as a few books I’d like to read. And because I create content I’ve also made a few goals for myself there

I want to read 50 books next year. As of writing this blog post I’ve read 116 books, so it’s a lot less. But I’m so burnt out and I have been for months. I’ve barely been reading anything and it’s a struggle to pick up a book. I want to bring joy and fun back into reading again for me. If that means slowing down and forcing myself to take my time with my books? Then that’s what I’ll do!

And for those 50 books, 12 of them will be from the Goldsboro GSFF book box because I want to continue reading those books the month after they arrive. It means I stay on top of them, and don’t let them build up, as well as reading a new release each month. Because most of my books are back list!

I’ll also be taking part in a few different book clubs next year, but the one with defined books is the spiritual successor to the Dead Famous Readalong and this will be for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series! We’ll be reading all 5 books from Douglas Adams as well as the 6th book from Eoin Colfer and I’m excited to dive into this comedy sci-fi!

I’d also like to finish the Lord of the Rings trilogy by the end of next year, but I’m not making that a hard and fast goal. It’s just more of a vibe I’m putting into the universe 😂

Then we come to my tbr. By 2359hr on 31/12/2023 I was my physical tbr to be below 100 books. As of pre-Christmas it’s sat at 146. This will probably be the most difficult of all my goals I’m setting myself, as I always have books coming in. I’ll probably have to look at unhauling books. But I would LOVE to start 2024 with less than 100 books to read and really work on making my tbr as small as possible!

And finally, my content goals. I’d like to hit 1000 subscribers on YouTube. I’m at 860 now so it’s attainable, but I’ll have to keep working at my content! I’ve got a few ideas so I just hope I can execute them in 2023.

For Instagram I’d like to hit 2000 followers. I’m at 1500 now so again this is attainable, but I specifically want to work on changing up my content this year. I’ve been doing the same thing for a while now and I want to keep it fresh and still enjoy the photos I’m putting out.

And finally TikTok. I’m pretty new to this platform but I’ve got almost 1000 followers already, so I’d like to aim for 2000 by the end of 2023. Is this too high? I’ve got no idea. I’m so new to the platform 😅 but I’m enjoying making the silly videos and looking forward to seeing where this goes next year!

And that’s it, those are my bookish goals! Keeping it nice and simple for this coming year so that I don’t overwhelm myself, but I’ll still be really pleased if I’m able to achieve them. Most importantly, I just hope that I enjoy myself next year!

Let me know what goals you have for your reading next year! It’s always fun to learn what challenges people have set for themselves.

2020 Goal Review!

At the end of 2019, I sat down with a friend and went through what my goals were going to be for the coming year. I had a variety of different things and a few different bullet points, but I was able to boil it down to some simple statements. For my reading, I wanted to read what was on my tbr shelves, and for my blog, I wanted to expand from just book reviews.

So how did I do?

Stack of hardback books with rainbow covers

Let’s focus on the reading portion first. How did I do with reading from my physical tbr? Well… okay? Ish? Honestly I could’ve done a lot better and as the year went on I definitely started picking up the new books that had came in and buying books the very few times I was able to (i.e. online shopping is our saviour this year) and then reading those. I definitely did get through a decent portion of the books from my original end of 2019 tbr, but not as many as I would’ve hoped to at the beginning of the year. And that’s mainly because I had wanted to read only from my already established tbr for the year. When I actually look at the stats, out of the 77 books I marked as read on my spreadsheet, 47 of them were from my tbr! That’s just over 60%! Now it’s not amazing, but at the same time I really shouldn’t sniff at almost 50 books being taken off of my tbr shelves this year (lets just not talk about the books that I added onto it!)

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Now onto the goal I had for this blog. In essence, I wanted to move away from only doing book reviews. I wanted to inject some of my personality into my blog posts and write about things going on and not just review the books I was reading throughout the year. Did I manage this? Well, I personally think that I got about halfway, and I’m really happy with that! I kicked off my version of the First Line Friday posts which I’m really enjoying and I’ve managed to keep those up consistently! At the beginning of 2020 I was posting more that was non-bookish and that faded pretty quickly. I just don’t think to go and blog about non-bookish things and as everything melted around us it wasn’t exactly the first thing on my mind. But I’ve expanded from just blog posts and for me that’s enough for now. It’s a step forward and I’m happy with that!

I think most of us weren’t able to hit our goals in the ways that we wanted to this year, but I’m lucky enough that I was able to make progress on mine and I’m hoping to carry them forward into next year! I am trying to specify a little more for 2021 to make it more of a challenge though so keep an eye out for that post!

How did your 2020 resolutions go? Bookish or non-bookish!