Mid Year Goal Check-In

At the beginning of 2021 I set out some goals that I wanted to reach for this year. Mid year seems like a good time to see if I’m on track!

If you want to see my original post on these you can check it out here! I sectioned my goals off so lets go section by section

READING

• Read 50 books – DONE! As of writing this blog post I have read 60 books so far this year and I’m in the middle of my 61st! I’ve absolutely smashed this goal. I have no idea how but I’m not complaining!
• 30+ read from my TBR – DONE! What the hell?! I’ve read 32 books from my physical TBR shelves so far this year! That’s insane! Why did I set my targets so low?!
• 1 book over 500 pages – DONE! I read over 500 pages of Long Walk to Freedom, but I did start that in 2020 so if you want something that “counts” I read The Mask Falling which comes in at 514 pages, as well as The Death of Evelyn Hardcastle at 513 pages, Dead or Alive at 597 pages, and a reread of Mortal Coil sitting at 572 pages. I think I’ve done pretty well on that goal!
• 2 contemporary books – DONE! I’ve got 5 books marked as “contemporary” on my spreadsheet which is a lot more than I had expected. I think some of the “literary fiction” I read can be marked as contemporary which has helped.
• 1 classic – DONE! 5 classics read so far this year! Some of them are from a set of teeny tiny books, so perhaps they don’t count. But I’ve still read Frankenstein and Pride and Prejudice!
• 5 books continuing in a series – DONE! Even if you only count a series once (as in I’ve read 2 new Skulduggery books this year) I still smash this goal!
• 1 buddy read – DONE! I’ve buddy read with Kari, Caitlyn and Bekka, as well as my still ongoing buddy read with Olivia! (more on that later)
• Diversity! – this is one that will never be “done”. But I am content with what I’ve managed so far. I’ve brought in quite a few diverse books as well as reading a minimum of one a month. I’ll definitely be keeping this up!

Returning to my buddy read with Olivia, War and Peace! We’re doing so well! We’re half way through the year and around 70% of the way through the book, which is amazing. We’re enjoying it too which is the most important thing. I’m really loving reading this book with Olivia and I’ll be so sad when we finally finish it! I’m anticipating finishing this around October rather than December which is really exciting.

BOOK BLOG

• expand past just book reviews – done? I think done. It’s a very recent done though. Until pretty recently non-review posts were few and far between. And yet somehow I’ve managed to up my game in the past month or so. I don’t know how, but I’m not complaining. I just hope that I can keep it up!
• non-bookish posts – I definitely haven’t written as much as I had wanted from non-bookish topics, I’ll give that one more push in the second half of the year but if I don’t do it then, well then it’s clearly not that important to me

BOOKTUBE

• more fun videos – I think that this is a “work in progress”. It’s not done, I still mainly create the same sort of content I did before. Primarily because this is something I’m used to and can manage on semi-autopilot whilst working a full time job. But I have made some fun videos, I’m thinking about my Måneskin video here, that I really enjoyed and that I want to do more of!
• quality over quantity – big fail. I wanted to post less to be able to post better content but instead everything has pretty much stayed the same. This is making me realise that I need to really focus in on this.

BOOKSTAGRAM

• engage with other posts – YES! This is never “done” cause it’s continuous but I’m definitely doing this and enjoying it! I love actually interacting on the platform and getting amazing ideas from other people!
• post almost daily – DONE DONE DONE! I have posted every single day in 2021 and I’ve got no plans to stop now! Scheduling has been my biggest life saver with this!

Wow! I’ve done so much better than I would’ve thought mid way through the year! Reading wise I’ve absolutely smashed it, and I’ve actually changed my goals a bit, moving away from number of books read to instead the number of pages, and that’s really helped me with my “reading bigger books” goal. Blog wise the success has been pretty recent so I need to keep that up, and if I don’t post about non-bookish things I don’t really mind. Bookstagram has been a roaring success. The biggest disappointment has been booktube. I’ve just really not put as much effort as I had wanted into filming. I know part of it is because filming is so much harder to do. Other people live here, there’s more prep and it takes more time. But I’m hoping that I can really knuckle down and make it a priority in the coming 6 months.

How has the first half of 2021 treat you bookish-wise? I hope you’ve been doing well and hitting all of your targets! But most importantly I hope you’ve been enjoying the books you picked up!

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!)

Blue wordpress logo

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!

2019 Goal Review!

 

I made some goals at the start of 2019, this is where I tell you how bad I was at sticking to them! I already uploaded this as a video on my YouTube channel so if you’d rather see it in video form then click this link here! If not then keep reading and I’ll tell you here!

My first goal was to read 50 books, and I managed it!! Clocking in at 54 books for the year. I had still hoped that I would read more than that, but it was not to be and I’m very happy to have reached this goal.

Goal number two was to read 25 books that I had already owned. I didn’t manage this one! 😥 I mostly read new books, which at least means that I didn’t add too many to my already too large tbr pile, but sadly I didn’t hit the goal. Fingers crossed I’ll read more of the books I already own in 2020.

The third goal was to buy no more than 50 books, a common number apparently for these goals! And I managed this one! I bought 43 books in total throughout the year, including a large haul of 19 books one month, so I’m very please with myself that I stuck to my aim and now I feel like I have much more control over how I charity book shop in comparisons with previously just picking up everything and anything I recognised.

Goal four was to reduce my NetGalley reads down to 0. NetGalley is where I get my eARCs from (my electronic advances reader copies of books before their publish date for review). I managed this one too, however, I later then added more to my “shelf” so I’m not sure where I’m at. I only added 3, and they all are published in 2020 so I’m not behind on any as of yet. But still, I need to get through them again!

My last goal was to read more diversely. I definitely didn’t define this goal enough or track it well enough. When making my stats video I found out that I read 89% white authors, which is atrocious, and a similar percentage of stories focused around straight people. The only redeeming factor was that 56% of my read books had been translated from other languages into English! This was without even trying to read any translated novels so I’m very happy with that number. Overall, however, I don’t want to say that I completed this goal as I didn’t read diversely enough to tick this off.

 

Overall it was about 50/50 in terms of success for my 2019 goals. I’m glad with what I managed and also with the progress that I made towards these goals! My next post will be my 2020 goals for reading and all things bookish so stay tuned if you want to see that!