Hello and happy Monday! It's a long weekend here this week, and I've had a wonderfully lazy few days full of coffee, kitties, books, and brunch!
With the New Year starting I've been thinking quite a bit about reading goals, but here we are almost in February already and I'm still not really sure where I stand in terms of setting goals for this year.
I've mentally split the types of things I'm thinking about setting goals around into a few categories, and I thought I'd talk about them a bit here today.
Firstly there's the Goodreads challenge, which is about how many books you are aiming to read overall in the year. I know that I'm not interest in trying to read the most books this year, or more books than this year, or any number oriented goals like that, so I've set mine at 75 books for this year.
Next, reading challenges that I want to join in with. So far I only have one on my radar: the Book Riot Read Harder Challenge which I've participated in the last few years and love doing with my book club at work. I really should do a wrap up post on how I went with this challenge in 2018! I tend to not necessarily stress too much about completely every single prompt in this challenge, but more to use it to make me more mindful of what I'm reading, and where there are gaps in the diversity of my reads. You can see the 2019 challenge list on the Book Riot website here.
The last mini category of goals I've been thinking about is the challenges I want to set myself. I have so many unread books at home, and while this doesn't completely freak me out like it would some people, I'd like to focus on getting through some of them. I'd also like to continue my focus on Australian writers, in particular #loveozya, women, and diverse/own voices stories. I think I'd like to try and hit 50% of my books read being by Aussie writers (I don't have a baseline to compare it to for last year because I was terrible at keeping up to date with my spread sheet!). I was thinking maybe I would try to read at least on #loveozya and one own voices book each month, but then these start to really add up to a huge monthly tbr once I add in my book club reads , plus the bookish escape crate books (every second month) and a couple of review copies from publishers each month... all of a sudden I've already 5 or 6 books on my list for the month and that's before I count new things that I come across during the year,
Now that we're home and getting back into a proper life routine again I intend to set aside some quiet time to sit down and do some planning to nut it out a bit more, so hopefully I'll be able to report back with some plans soon! In the mean time, I'd love to hear about any reading goals other have, and how you set them!
xo Bron
