I usually never set hard and fast reading goals for myself. It’s something that I had always hated when I was in school. We would always have to read a certain type of book, usually a classic or three, and that would be the focus of the year. Forget loving fantasy or sci-fi, they need not apply. Even in college, when I was on the English/Creative Writing track, we were heavily encouraged to only read what was assigned to us, and if we had any free time, to focus on literary fiction. Genre fiction need not apply.
Because of that, and being burned by Accelerated Reader so many times, I developed some really bad reading habits. I blast through books without taking the time to really focus on characters or anything besides the main plot. If I do slow down, I find myself bored. Another thing is, if I stop reading at any point, for more than a few hours (like, I went to bed or something), getting back into a book is an outright nightmare. I could only do that with rereads, and only certain ones at that.
For the past several years, I’ve signed up for the Goodreads Reading Challenge. My bad habits came out in a big way because of this. I’d read a bunch during the beginning of the year, taper off during summer, and blast through a lot of manga or graphic novels by November and December. Or I’d just lie. Because honesty doesn’t exist when a non-competing reading challenge is at stake. (That was sarcastic, I swear.)
This year, I decided to try to change things up a little bit.
I cut my Goodreads Reading Goal to almost in half. Instead of 100 books, I’m aiming for 52, which is amount of weeks in a year. So, if I miss a week or two (which I did at the beginning of the year), I can make it up pretty quickly. This has already lifted a weight off my shoulder, which is something that I was doing to myself.
Another goal for me is to review everything I read. I have this terrible habit of not talking about what I read, or just a one line little sentence. I miss discussions (and book club meetings). To compensate for that, I’m going to try to give at least a one hundred word review for what I read. Will I do it every time? Probably not. I’m totally gonna miss a book at least twice this year. I also want to give honest ranking. Not just giving everything that I’m okay with a 4-star. I want to be honest. I’ll go into that in more detail in another post.
A goal that came to mind when I decided to write this post is to not hold myself to finish a book. By that, I mean that if I’m truly not enjoying a book, I can set it down to return to it later or DNF it altogether. I usually hate doing this. I have so many books with sticky note bookmarks in them. And I just don’t like DNF’ing books. But I am giving myself permission to do that this year. I actually already did this, when I put down Rebel Rose, which was the first book I started reading in 2021. It just didn’t click with me, at least right now. With the world the way it is, I’m not going to force myself to do something that I just can’t get my heart into.
There is a goal, or rather two goals, that I would like to complete, though I’m not stressing about it. One is to read all the Owlcrate releases for 2021. I’m so behind in reading my Owlcrate books, it’s not even funny. They’re all sitting on my unorganized bookshelves, taunting me. I would really love to finish at least the next twelve. But I’m still going to follow my previous goal, so if it’s not clicking with me, I can set it down. (I did that with Everland in May 2016.)
I’d also like to catch up with the Barnes and Noble YA Book Club. I’m several books behind, even though I was so excited for so many books. I still am hoping for in person book club meetings to resume in summer/fall 2021, so I want to be caught up. That’s about a year’s worth of monthly releases, excluding December (that month was skipped).
The only other goal I have is to not force myself to read something because of #reasons. By that, I mean I want to read books as I get to them, not because it’s a certain month or because of some arbitrary reason. I’m not planning on taking part in any readathons, unless they are just for myself, for the same reason. By setting sometimes unrealistic goals for myself, I find myself beyond stressed out and just not happy with the results.
I do have a small list of books I want to get to this year, but as I said, no pressure. They include:
- The Percy Jackson series (all books) by Rick Riordan. My cousin is slowly working his way through the series, and I want to be there for him as he finishes each part. This is a personal goal of mine, not something to speed to.
- Hold Still by Nina LaCour (among other books by her). I loved her book We Are Okay, which actually destroyed me. I would love to read more from her.
- Sarah Dessen. Look I just want to reread several of my favorite novels by her, including Lock and Key.
- Manga: I want to finish Bloom into You and Our Wonderful Days, two absolutely beautiful yuri manga that caught my eye around last summer. I haven’t yet finished both of them (three left for Bloom, just the final volume for Wonderful Days), and I really want to see the conclusions. But that’s about it on manga, considering the amount I read last year.
- The Sword Art Online light novels. I would love to reread Progressive, in light of the announcement of Sword Art Online the Movie – Progressive – Aria of a Starless Night. Progressive is a retelling of the beginning of the light novel series, with much more depth. There are six thus far, and I think it would be good to at least have that knowledge. I also want to read Moon Cradle and Unital Ring, both continuations of the original series, post Alicization. [And it is here, I realize, that I am a massive anime nerd and not many people would understand why I care about all this. But I do so shush. And yes, that all made sense to me.]
There are, of course, many books that I haven’t referenced here that I’m aiming to read this year. More specifically, Good Girl, Bad Blood by Holly Jackson (the highly anticipated sequel to last year’s A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, finally releasing in the states almost four months after its UK release). Also, there is I Think I Love You by Auriane Desombre, which has been on my must read list since it was announced in early 2020, only to be delayed twice thanks to the pandemic (first to September 2020, now March 2021). And there is the book that might be a Peter Pan-retelling, though no one is quite sure. Lost in the Never Woods is by Aiden Thomas, coming off of his debut Cemetery Boys, which I’ll be reading hopefully this year (book club book).
And there are more. My shelves are lined with books I just haven’t gotten to yet, or ones that I want to return to. So here’s to that!
Until next time!
