My 2018 Reading Challenge Recap

It’s time for my annual recap! Each year in January, I set a goal for the number of books that I want to read over the next twelve months as part of the Goodreads Reading Challenge. I learned my lesson last year about being too ambitious with my numerical goal, and set my sights a little lower. But it looks like this year I might still fall just a bit short.

As of writing this post, I have read 44 of my pledged 50 books, but I’ve still got a week to see if I can squeeze in a few more before the new year. You can check out all the books I’ve read for my 2018 Goodreads Reading Challenge here, and as always, feel free to follow me on Goodreads to keep up with my reviews. My favorite book from this year was Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant (a.k.a. Seanan McGuire), which I reviewed back in September. This mermaid slasher horror with a diverse cast and clever science was unlike anything I’ve ever read before. Even though, overall, I read fewer books than last year, I feel that I stepped out of my comfort zone more often and read a wider variety of genres. I read three nonfiction books, a couple of literary classics, and a few pieces of Literary fiction—a genre I don’t often touch on. I had a good mix of reading books by my old favorite authors—such as Leanna Renee Hieber, Libba Bray, and Anne Rice—while also discovering new debut authors like Julie C. Dao, Tomi Adeyemi, and Yangsze Choo.

Unlike the last two years, I didn’t participate in any additional reading challenges for 2018. While I enjoyed participating in Book Riot’s Read Harder Challenge in 2017, I found it was difficult to meet such specific requirements while also focusing on reading books to review for the blog. In the past, I’ve also participated in the We Need Diverse Books reading challenge and set a goal for the number of books I hoped to read that are by or about members of marginalized groups. Like last year, I didn’t set a specific number for 2018, but I brought into this year the newfound consciousness of these issues that I had developed during my last few years of participating. Roughly one-fifth of the books I read featured central characters with marginalized identities—including people of color, people with disabilities, and members of the LGBT+ community—or were written by authors belonging to those groups. While not as high as last year, it’s certainly a higher percentage than I generally read before finding the WNDB community and participating in this challenge. It also helped that the industry has been improving in this area, and this year authors like Tomi Adeyemi, Dhonielle Clayton, and Justina Ireland received a lot of buzz.

It felt freeing to participate in fewer challenges this year and to focus instead on broader goals like reading diversely, taking a chance on new authors, and exploring a wider variety of genres. For 2019, I’m going to set myself the slightly lower goal of 45 books so that I can have more room to read longer and more challenging works. I’m hoping to get back to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which I stopped in the middle of, and to read a few more of the early Gothics.

What are your reading goals for 2019? How well did you meet your goals for 2018? What was your favorite book that you read this year? Let me know in the comments!