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!)

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!

2021 Goals!

We finally escaped!!! (near enough okay) 2020 is behind us and we can begin to move on and hope for better things to come in the near future! (the second I can get that vaccine I’m jumping on it!) New years is always a great time to set new goals, but I feel like the end of this year in particular is one where a lot of people have been able to really hone in on what they love, what they prioritise their time on, and what can be left as a non-priority. So let’s see what my goals are for this year!

READING
So my main overarching goal is the same this year as last: read the books on my physical tbr. But I’ve put numerical values to my goals this year, as well as adding some more into the mix.

• Read 50 books: this isn’t a high amount, I managed 78 in 2020, but I want to keep it high enough that it’s motivation but not so high that I need to stretch for it. I’m trying to involve my other hobbies alongside reading and so this one can’t be too high
• 30 (or above) I already own: nice and self explanatory, at least 30 of t5 he books I read in ’21 need to have been on my shelves at the stroke of midnight Jan 1st. This gives me some room for the new releases I know are coming and some ebooks and audiobooks, but also keeps me accountable
• 1 book over 500 pages: I’m both intimidated and fascinated by long books. I used to adore them as a kid. This is me trying to coax myself back into reading and loving them!
• 2 contemporary books: I really am not keen on this genre, and I have 4 on my shelves (I think) so I really just need to get through them and this will hopefully be the push I need
• 1 classic: Although a lot of my classics are also contemporary I’m wanting to keep them separate for now. I have a few of these all shelved together and I really want to make a move on them
• 5 from an already started series: there are a few series’ on my shelves where I own all of the books but either haven’t made a start or have been part of the way through for a while. This year I want to read 5 books from series’ that I’ve already began and that’ve been living on my shelves
• 1 buddy read: I love the idea of buddy reads and I did one in 2020 and loved it so I definitely want to do one more this year!
• Diversity! (no not the dance group, although they’re great) I want the books that I’m adding to my tbr and to my wishlist to be diverse. I definitely made strides in 2020 towards that, but I’m going to work to make it even better in 2021

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy – Wordsworth edition

And going back to the topic of buddy reads….I’m going to be buddy reading War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy with Olivia-Savannah from Olivia’s Catastrophe!!! This epic is going to be a year long read for us both as we’re only reading 1 chapter a day (apart from a couple days where we’ll have to read 2, cause there are more than 365 chapters in this beast!) but it’s going to be a really good way for the both of us to get into this chunky tomb and be able to discuss is as well. I’m so so looking forward to it and I hope Olivia is too!

Book blog

My goal here is similar to last year too, but once again I have some more actionable points to strive for rather than a general theme. I want to expand the blog past book reviews. I’m going to be mainly sticking to things like:

• book tags
• wrap ups
• tbrs
• books lists

but there will be the occasional post about other things that are important to me, like;

• podcasts
• music
• gaming
• the environmental state of the planet

Or at least that’s the plan! We’ll see how 2021 goes!! But I’d like to make an effort to include those within my blog and just to express myself more on here. Moving back towards the book reviews, I also want to work on exporting these to different sites. I schedule a lot of my reviews meaning that I don’t want to post them elsewhere first. But it’s not like people pay attention to me anyways (have you even gotten this far into the post? Potatoes!) and by doing this I tend to forget to then cross post them to Waterstones/Goodreads/Amazon and I really want to do this, especially for the smaller authors that I read cause it will help readers a lot to see more reviews about these works! Doing this’ll be a mix of going through my backlog (that’s gunna be a time) and also making sure that as I write new reviews I post them everywhere at the moment of writing. That way I can’t forget!!

Booktube

My main platform! And yet one of the hardest to create things for. I don’t get a lot of alone time in the house, and when I do that doesn’t always correlate with when I have the free time myself to film videos. It’s one of the main reasons I batch film. Ideally I’d be moving out of my parents place and therefore be able to film easier, but that’s a bit of a loft goal, so instead I’m going to tentatively work towards more fun videos. Things like:

• having secret tbrs
• joining in readathons
• reading vlogs
• if you like this you’ll like this

But those are things that require more filming time and more effort. So I’ll have to balance that against the amount of time I do have, how tired I am after work (my chronically ill body does not like working full time but on a rotating shift pattern), and also whether I’m willing to sacrifice the number of videos I put out in order to create what will hopefully be a better quality product. (I mean yes in theory, but what if I’m shit at it and instead you get no vids and then one shite one?). This’ll be a difficult one for me this year, so I’ll have to see how things develop and hopefully then in 2022 I’ll be able to make more of a crack on this!

Bookstagram

I’m pretty happy with how I did things this year! I mainly just wanna keep it up! I’m still evolving all the time in terms of my photo style and making sure that I engage with people. It’s one thing to post a drafted pic after work when you have a migraine. It’s another to sit and scroll through all the other photos. But it’s only fair and I do it when I can! I also managed to post almost daily this year and that’s definitely something I want to keep on top of. Taking pictures on a Sunday and editing them and drafting them that day too really helps and I like the consistency it brings. It’s my little schedule.

And that’s it! (as if this blog post wasn’t massive) Those are my bookish-related goals for 2021! What goals do you have for this year? Let me know how many books you wanna read!

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!