What a great year for reading it’s been! This is the first year in at least a decade that I haven’t participated in the official Goodreads Reading Challenge, since I stopped using Goodreads to track my reading. I did, however, still set reading goals for myself and keep track of each book I read, and I found 2023 to be one of the best reading years of my adult life.
This year has been a year full of major life changes, including all sorts of changes to my reading habits. One major change is that I’m starting to move away from Goodreads, and am reevaluating how I track and document the books that I read. So this may very well be my last time doing the Goodreads Reading Challenge, specifically, though I will still be tracking my books and setting numerical goals. I’m still experimenting with finding the best alternatives, but one that I’ve started using is StoryGraph. I’m not sure how much I’ll be posting on there, but you can follow along with me at TheGothicLibrary.
This year has been an amazing reading year for me—though it’s been a real rollercoaster of a year in almost every other way. These days, I’m reading at a pace that I haven’t matched since high school, often finishing more than one book a week. This is the first time in many years that I’ve easily blown past my numerical reading goal. However, I wasn’t quite as successful with my content-based goals. Let me walk you through my year in books:
Well, it has certainly been a strange year! But if nothing else, 2020 has been a fairly good year of reading for me. As always, I participated in the annual Goodreads Reading Challenge, and this was the first time in many years that I easily met my numerical goal well in advance. The pandemic has changed my reading habits significantly, and many of my goals and priorities shifted from what I thought they would be at the beginning of the year. Let’s take a look back at my year in books!
Let’s look back at my year of books! Every year I participate in the Goodreads Reading Challenge, setting myself a numerical goal of books to read, as well as some more abstract goals. This year I set myself an easily attainable numerical goal, though I did end up losing sight of some of my larger objectives.
Good news—I just completed my 2016 Goodreads Reaching Challenge! This year, I set myself what I thought was a rather moderate goal: to read 50 books over the course of the year. Though in my high school years I think I could have easily surpassed that number, I’d been repeatedly falling short the last two or three years of doing the challenge because college really cut into my reading time. Ironically, I read far fewer books while studying to be an English major, but that’s what happens when you spend an entire semester reading War and Peace… Now, for my first full year after graduating, I’ve been truly taking advantage of the opportunity to read whatever I want again. And of course, having a book blog to write for weekly has certainly spurred me on.
This is a little last minute, but I’m hoping to hop on the Bloggiesta train once again. Bloggiesta is a regularly occurring blogging marathon in which a bunch of bloggers band together to challenge and support each other as we each work on improving our blogs, and it’s starting RIGHT NOW! The Fall Bloggiesta 2016 runs from today (Thursday, September 15th) until Sunday, September 18th. You can learn more on the Bloggiesta website.
Are you participating in Bloggiesta? What are your goals? How is it going so far? Let me know in the comments!
Earlier this year, I participated in my very first Bloggiesta event—the Winter 2016 Mini-Bloggiesta. For those who don’t know, Bloggiesta is blogging marathon in which a bunch of bloggers band together to challenge and support each other as we each work on improving our blogs. This whole week, starting today and going until Sunday, March 27, is a week-long Bloggiesta event. You can learn more at the Bloggiesta website.
Last Bloggiesta I got a lot done: I got to know a bunch of other bloggers, participated in some twitter chats and mini challenges, linked to my reviews on other websites, rearranged parts of my blog design, and started to actually plan out my blog posts in advance! I’m not going to be particularly ambitious with this Bloggiesta because it’s hard to do blog things during the week when I work full time, and I’ve been really struggling with time management lately. That said, I’m going to try to set myself a few reasonable goals.
Are you participating in Bloggiesta? Have you done it in the past? What are your goals? Let me know in the comments!
I’m very excited to be participating in a Bloggiesta event for the first time! For those who don’t know, Bloggiesta is blogging marathon in which a bunch of bloggers band together to challenge and support each other as we each work on improving our blogs. This coming weekend (Saturday the 16th and Sunday the 17th) is the yearly winter mini Bloggiesta! You can find out more at the Bloggiesta website.
On New Year’s Day, I posed a list of broad goals I’d like to accomplish with this blog over the coming year. But today I’d like to share my to do list of concrete tasks to accomplish this weekend in order to get going down the right path.
Are you participating in Bloggiesta? Have you done it in the past? Let me know in the comments!
Today is my final day of the 3 Days, 3 Quotes Challenge! Thanks again to Wandering Words for nominating me.
Day 3’s quote is from The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, generally considered to be the beginning of the modern mystery/detective genre:
We had our breakfasts—whatever happens in a house, robbery or murder, it doesn’t matter, you must have your breakfast.
