Last year, I set a few reading resolutions, as I have done for many years.
I wanted to finish the 2017 Read Harder Challenge. NOPE. Not even close! I started it, but due to developing circumstances throughout the year, I had way less time for reading this year. So when I wanted to read, I wanted to read what I wanted to read, not what a challenge told me I should be reading. So, yeah. I gave up pretty early on. Ah, well.
I wanted to read at least 30 children's or teen nonfiction books this year. Well, nope. I read 23 children's or teen nonfiction books. But I also read a bunch of adult nonfiction books.
I wanted to read at least 50 teen books this year. Again, nope! I read 42 teen books this year.
I wanted at least 25% of the books I read to be by people of color. As of Dec. 23, I had read 172 books total, according to my GoodReads page. 71 of those books were written by authors of color, which is 41%. Yay! A goal I met! And probably the most important goal to me, so we'll call this year good.
I had set a goal of reading 201 books this year and that didn't happen. It was partly because I had less time to read and partly because I read way more adult books, which just generally take longer to read than youth books.
Let's look ahead to 2018.
I'm not going to set a GoodReads goal because at this point in my life and career, reading more just isn't my goal. I have looked at Book Riot's 2018 Read Harder Challenge and many of the categories fit with personal goals for my reading this year (particularly to read more adult genre fiction). So I'm going to attempt it this year and we'll see how it goes.
I have a number of ideas for reading projects that I want to try this year.
I want to focus on a couple of authors that I always mean to read more of: Sherman Alexie and Louise Erdrich are my picks for this year. So I'm going to attempt to read at least two books by each of them this year.
I find myself drawn to short stories and that's a genre that I have not picked up much lately! So I'm doing a Short Story Project and aiming to read at least 6 collections of short stories this year.
I need to expand my genre reading and I'm hoping to get Reading Wildly back off the ground this year, but I'm not sure what it's going to look like yet, so no official goal on that one (yet?).
And I loved concentrating on reading diverse voices this year, so I'm going to up the ante and say that I want at least 40% of my reading this year to be books by people of color.
And I'm super geekily excited about trying out this detailed Reading Log created by Book Rioter Rachel Manwill. I love all the things it tracks and that it automatically calculates percentages for you (arg, another goal for myself this year should be to learn about spreadsheets!). So I will be putting that to good use this year.
What are your reading goals for 2018? How are you going to read better this year?