2023 Reading Resolutions & Goals

January 1, 2023 Ali@abookishlife8 Comments

Happy 2023 Everyone!

As is tradition at the start of a new year I’ve decided to set myself some reading targets for the year. As is also tradition these targets will be largely discarded by February but even if I don’t necessarily meet the specific “I will read x books of this type” goals I find it useful to set out what I want to focus on in 2023. This year is mostly about getting caught up and working my way through my backlist books and TBR. I still want to read diversely, venture out of my reading comfort zone and try new authors and genres but my backlist is so out of control that I feel I should really make it my priority for the year ahead.

My Reading Goals for 2023

1. Books/Pages/Hours

For me quality is always more important than quantity so I try not to get too caught up in how many books or pages I’m reading. I don’t necessarily want to read more books this year so I’ve set my target at 100 books and 35,000 pages. This is the same target I’ve used for the past few years and should be pretty achievable for me. Given I’ve been listening to a lot more audiobooks over the last year I’ve set a target of 90 hours. It takes me a while to get through a book on audio so this is probably equivalent to around 9 or 10 books over the year.

2. Translated Fiction

I love translated fiction and some of my all time favourite reads (Travelling Cat Chronicles) have been translated from another language. It gives you a real insight into other cultures and often different writing styles. I didn’t do very well in terms of reading translated fiction during 2022 (I don’t think I read any) so I’d like to pick up at least 6 books during the year. I currently have the following sitting on my tbr so hopefully these will be part of my 6.

3. Non Fiction

One thing I did do better than usual in 2022 was reading (or listening to) non fiction. I listened to a couple of absolutely brilliant memoirs, a travel book and a science/self help book. I’m therefore setting myself the goal or reading at least 6 non fiction books during the year. I have a few ideas (below) but if you have any suggestions for a truly fascinating or inspiring book let me know in the comments. I haven’t read much non fic so chances are I won’t have read whatever you have.

4. Debut/New to Me Authors

I’m always on the lookout for a new favourite author and am keen to support debut authors in particular, it’s a crowded market out there so I’m aiming to read one book by either a debut author or an author who is new to me each month. I have a couple of ideas for books to include on the list and one of my book subscriptions (next goal) is mostly debut fiction so I think it should be easy enough to achieve.

5. Book Subscription books

I currently have 3 book subscriptions on the go at the moment, Illumicrates monthly book only subscription, their Afterlight Romance box which is bi-monthly and a signed fiction subscription from Bert’s Books. Basically I get a lot of books through my letterbox which I am not always great at reading. I still have 20 books from 2022 I have yet to read. I also discovered when moving my bookcase a few months ago that I have half a dozen unread books from a Fairyloot subscription in 2016. As I could really do with a bit more shelf space I need to read and unhaul some of those backlist books and get better at reading new books as they come in. I also need to start skipping months so that I’m not receiving books I have no interest in reading. I’m therefore aiming to read 12 books received last year (or earlier) and read each new book I receive within a month. I’ll also skip at least 6 books.

6. Popsugar 2023 Reading Challenge

Every year I have a bash at the Popsugar Reading Challenge and I have not completed it yet. I’m actually okay with that as I use the prompts more as inspiration rather than anything else. It’s led to me venturing out of my comfort zone and discovering books and genres that weren’t even on my radar. This year’s theme is nostalgia so there are a lot of great prompts that should be easy to meet without a whole lot of searching and a few that are a little more challenging but sound fun. There are as always a few that I’m less keen on, ones requiring a specific publication year or something on the cover but I’m happy to skip those.

7. Owned TBR / Backlist Books

I counted the unread books in my bookcase a few months ago and had over 100, and this is just my physical TBR. I’m too scared to look at my ebook TBR. I’m starting to run out of shelf space and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to justify buying new books when I have so many books already that I’ve yet to read. I therefore want to knock at least 2 books that I own and bought last year (or earlier) off my TBR each month. So of the 100 books I hope to read this year I want a quarter of those to be backlist books.

8. Stop Buying Books

Just kidding, this is never going to happen particularly as I have vouchers to spend and I literally bought 6 books today (first day of the month means new deals). What I think I’m going to try is being a little less click happy on that buy now button. I’m going to pause to consider if I will actually read the book. I’m also going to try and resist those pretty covers and sprayed edges on special edition books. A pretty cover and a sprayed edge does not mean the story is one I will enjoy. I’m also considering introducing a new book fund, I saw this on Facebook, where for every owned book I finish I add some money to the pot and use that to fund my book buying ~~addiction~~. Not sure if it’ll work but anything is worth a try.

9. And Finally

Read the books I want to read without guilt and don’t be afraid to DNF. It’s too easy to get sucked into reading the books you think you should be reading (the literary ones, the award winning books, the ones everyone is raving about) rather than reading the books you actually want to read. I also have a bit of a tendency to keep plugging away at a book long beyond the point when I should have given up on it as it’s clearly not for me. 2023 shall be the year of guilt free reading and yeeting the books I’m finding a struggle.

So that’s my bookish goals for the year. Hopefully these will be challenging but achievable for me. If you have any recommendations for books I should read for any of these categories, non fic in particular let me know below.

Do you set yourself reading goals or do you prefer to just read what you want when you want?

2022 Reading Wrap Up – A Year in Graphs

December 31, 2022January 1, 2023 Ali@abookishlife6 Comments

Hi all and a happy new year,

I hope you’re all happy, healthy and looking forward to the start of a New Year, I know I am as 2022 has been a difficult year for me. There’s been a lot of change and uncertainty, a ton of work stress and I lost my horse Charlie unexpectedly during the Summer. Needless to say I was not wholly successful in meeting my reading, or blogging goals for the year. I was probably even more of a mood reader than usual and nice, uplifting comfort reads were very much my go to reads for a lot of the time. I did however manage to track my reads (mostly) for the year, thank you Storygraph, so I thought why not do a reading wrap up of 2022 using some of their graphs.

My 2022 Reading in Graphs

At the start of 2022 I decided to try using Storygraph to track my reads and honestly I’m finding it so much better than Goodreads. It doesn’t have the same community that Goodreads has, yet, but it’s much better in terms of adding/finding books, tracking your progress against reading challenges and producing stats in the form of graphs that you can slot into a blog post 🙂 Every year I set up a spreadsheet to track my reads with the intention of doing some graphs of my reading (I work with numbers so love a graph) and by around the second week of January the spreadsheet has been abandoned. Storygraph has therefore been a godsend, so much so that I’m very tempted to move to “Plus” so I can get some more stats and graphs (I’m currently using the free version). So what do the graphs say about my reading in 2022?

1. Books/Pages Read – 112 books / 39,355 pages

I set my target for the year at 100 books and 35,000 pages but managed to finish a total of 112 books, reading just over 39,000 pages. Work tends to be super busy at the start and end of the year and a little quieter in spring and summer, so the number of books finished in a month ranged from a low of 5 in December to a high of 14 in April. The months with higher reads are also the ones where I was taking part in team reading challenges with Uno running from February to April and Tower Teams from mid May to August.

2. Average Rating – 3.79 Stars

Despite reading 112 books I seem to have only rated 110, no idea what the missing two are and I’m too lazy to check. One of the things I love about Storygraph is that you can give quarter and half stars. I want my books to be pretty much perfect before I’ll give them the full 5 stars so it’s great to have the option for 4.5 and 4.75 stars for those books I loved but weren’t perfect. I ended up only giving 4 books the full 5 stars with 6 getting 4.75 stars and 9 at 4.5 stars. Expect a separate post soon on my favourite reads of the year. The majority of books were around the 4 star mark so despite a couple of truly bad reads (I blame booktok) I’d say most of my books were enjoyable ones.

3. Mood – Mostly uplifting, light hearted books

I’m not entirely sure how accurate the “Mood” categorisations are on Storygraph and I’m pretty sure books appear on this more than once (a single book could be lighthearted, funny and relaxing for example) but I think this does sum up the majority of my reads this year. I was definitely leaning into the easy, uplifting and comforting books this year although there were a few dark and tense reads in there too

4. Most Read Genre / Authors

Given the main moods of my reads over the last year it should be no surprise that Romance and Contemporary were the main genres read this year. Again I’m pretty sure books are double counted and pop up in more than one genre

Given my main genres are romance and contemporary, it’s probably not a shock that 8 of my 10 most read authors write books that are heavy on the romance, with only Martha Wells and Lucy Foley the exceptions. Tessa Bailey and Bea Paige were new authors to me this year. I ended up going on a bit of a series binge with Bea Paige and Ilona Andrews which is why both appear so highly on the list. Tessa Bailey has become a new favourite author so it’s likely she’ll pop up on next year’s list too.

5 Other Stats

I don’t read a lot of non fiction so for four of my books this year to be non fiction is actually a big increase compared to previous years when I’ve maybe managed one or two. Of the four books two were memoirs, one was self help (I think) and the other was travel

Again this one is not really a shock to me. I set my target of 35,000 pages based on 100 books with an average of 350 pages as that tends to be roughly the length of the majority of the books I read. I tend to avoid longer books so I’m not shocked that only 2 books had over 500 pages. I am slightly surprised by how many of my reads this year had less than 300 pages but I guess between Murderbot, a few novellas and shorter romance reads it’s about right.

I haven’t had much focus over the last year (or possibly ever) so slower paced books tend to be a bit of a struggle for me. I wish I had the concentration for them as I know there are some real gems I’m missing out on but every time I try to read a slower paced book I almost always end up having to reread sections or generally avoiding the book.

Overall I’m pretty happy with my reading over the last year. Would I have liked to read more translated fiction, longer books, a larger mix of genres? Yes. But there were times when I was just happy I was managing to read anything and actually enjoying reading. There were some not great books in there but there were some brilliant books in there too. I discovered quite a few new authors, read a few books that were out of my comfort zone, discovered I like memoirs and supported debut authors and indie bookshops.

All in I’m saying it was a good reading year. Here’s hoping 2023 is even better.

Summer TBR

June 14, 2021 Ali@abookishlife6 Comments

Hello all,

I hope you’re all doing well, or as well as can be expected. I know I’ve been MIA yet again but work got busy and I’ve been finding it really difficult to balance everything. Add to that a laptop that’s probably nearing the end of its life and yep, blogging has definitely fallen by the wayside.

Anyway, I’ve had a week off work (a rare occurrence), so am determined to do this thang, starting with a Summer TBR. I do love a TBR post as it fills me with the optimism that I have some goals and a plan. My full TBR list is significantly bigger than this but I’ve tried to pull out a nice mix of genres and authors from the books at the top of my list. I will no doubt deviate (what can I say, I’m a mood reader) but this gives me a good starting point.

Book Club Books

I’ve somehow ended up in about four different book clubs which I have to confess is not going great in terms of me actually getting to all of the books I’m supposed to be reading for them. I do try however to prioritise the books for my RL work book club. This month’s read is Scabby Queen which I started around a week ago but parked because I wasn’t in the right mood and was losing focus. I will however pick it up again soon as I think it may turn out to be one I love. The Midnight Library and The End of Men are on our list of future picks and are ones I’ve been looking forward to reading so I may try to get a head start on them.

ARCS

I have soooo many ARCs, someone seriously needs to shut off my request button on Netgalley. I’ve not done too badly in terms of reading a lot of them but I am very behind in reviews. I think I probably need to make an effort to read as many as possible (and get those reviews written) over the next few months and I suspect I’ll pick up whichever appeals at that particular moment but the following are some recent approvals that I’m pretty excited about.

Bookshelf/Backlist

As there’s not a huge amount to spend money on at the moment I have been doing quite a bit of book shopping. All those special/signed editions have been calling to me. As a result I’ve got a little bit of a backlog of books I’ve bought but not had a chance to read as yet. I also have a few books I’ve been putting off reading till the full series is available (I’m looking at you King of Scars) so hoping to pick them up too.

Audiobooks

Finally, I have a few audio books lined up on audible. The inclusion of Project Hail Mary is possibly a bit of a cheat as I’ve already started it but it’s pretty long so will probably take me till the end of the month to finish it. I do love sci fi stories on audio for some reason.

So that’s my list. I’m pretty excited about it. There are soooo many good books around at the moment, I just hope I manage to read them all.

Have you read any of these? Any recommendations on where I should start? Let me know in the comments.

Happy Reading

Ax

Happy New Year & 2021 Reading Resolutions

January 1, 2021 Ali@abookishlife12 Comments

Happy 2021 Everyone!!! I hope you’re all keeping safe and well.

I think we can all agree that 2020 was not great but I’m trying to be hopeful that 2021 will be better. I have to confess that I didn’t do very well with my reading (or blogging) goals last year. I found it difficult to focus for any length of time and counted pretty much any time spent reading as a win. I also sort of gave up tracking my reads and writing reviews so I have no idea how many books I actually managed to read and my NetGalley shelf got completely out of control.

2021 is however a new year and the chance for a fresh start so I’m setting myself some gentle reading and blogging goals yet again.

My 2019 Bookish (and personal) Goals

January 13, 2019 Ali@abookishlife12 Comments

So we’re well into 2019 and these are long overdue but I decided that rather than post some overly optimistic goals at the very start of the year I’d wait a week or two and see which ones stuck 🙂

2018 was a fantastic bookish year for me but I have to confess I failed miserably with pretty much every goal I set for myself last year. Given this, there’s arguably not much point in setting new goals (I don’t exactly beat myself up if I don’t achieve them) but I do find it useful to reflect on what I have achieved and think about what I want to do. I might fail again but it does at least give me a little bit of motivation for the next ~~few weeks~~ 12 months.

My 2018 Bookish Goals

December 28, 2017 Ali@abookishlife35 Comments

2017 is almost over and while I’ve had an incredible bookish year I’ve already started thinking about what I want to achieve in 2018. I tend to avoid New Year’s Resolutions as I know I’ll never stick to them but last year I set some reading and blog goals and actually met a lot of them so I want to do the same for 2018.

I’m probably not going to beat myself up over them if I don’t achieve them, reading and blogging should be fun after all, but I’m hoping these goals will give me a little bit of motivation and kick start the year.

My 2017 Bookish Goals

January 2, 2017 Ali@abookishlife26 Comments

Happy 2017 Everyone!!

While 2016 wasn’t really that bad a year for me, a new year means a new start and the opportunity to make a few changes and set some goals. I don’t really believe in New Year’s resolutions as I can never stick to them but this year I’ve decided I am going to set myself some bookish goals. Read More »