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| (All photos are mine from my Instagram account.) |
2021 Goals
Overall Goal
I set myself the goal of reading 55 books in 2021. I read 110. WHAT?!?! That is more books than I've read in one year in my entire adult life. Including the four years after college but before kids. I think it's because, every week, my older daughter takes 90-minute gymnastics lessons, my younger daughter takes 30-minute swimming lessons, and my son takes 1-hour fencing lessons. Those are nice, regular chunks of time for me to spend with a book.
My Year with Harry Potter
I wanted to reread all seven original Harry Potter books in one year, and I did it! And it was fantastically fun.
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| (No question who my favorite HP character is, huh?) |
#TheUnreadShelfChallenge2021
I set myself the goal of reading 24 books off my physical TBR shelves. When I hit that goal, I doubled it to 48. My final numbers: 62 read, 65 unshelved... but also 112 new unread books acquired, so my total number of unread books went from 527 to 512. Which is progress, but not huge progress. Still, better than a stick in the eye.
Diverse Reads
I'm working on reading more books by and about people from different cultures, ethnicities, backgrounds, and abilities than my own, and I've challenged myself to read 12 such books a year. That's roughly one a month, though it doesn't always shake out exactly that way. It keeps me mindful of reading about people who are different from me in some way. I read 15 diverse books in 2021, so I definitely succeeded there.
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| (These candles are from Northanger Soapworks.) |
Sense and Sensibility Read-along
I lead a chapter-by-chapter read-along of Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen here on my blog beginning in March and ending in May. It was incredibly fun! I'd missed leading read-alongs, even though they're pretty time-consuming, and I may try leading another this summer. If you've got suggestions/wishes for that, let me know in the comments.
Overall, I am really happy with my 2021 reading! I would like to have made better progress clearing out unread books... but the fault is in my buying more books, not in my reading, and I did hit my goals, so yay!
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| (All set to begin new reading adventures!) |
2022 Goals
Overall Goal
I'm keeping this at 55 this year. You never know, I may get weirdly busy or something. That's a little more than one a week, so I like it.
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| (Um, yes, I love bookish candles.) |
My Year with Irene Kelly
I started reading the Irene Kelly series by Jan Burke back in 2012. I started with book nine by accident, then went back and read the first three... and then, well, book four was never in at my library branch, and I never remembered to put it on hold so I could get it from any of the other branches. And then the library got rid of the whole series a few years later. So I've been hunting them down at used book stores for years, and I finally gave up and got the rest from AbeBooks. Which means I have all eleven of them now, and I'm going to read the whole series in the correct order. Four will be rereads, but seven will count for my Unread Shelf Project, so that's a nice intersection of challenges.
#TheUnreadShelfChallenge2022
My new goal this year is simply to get myself under 500 unread books on my shelves, and then stay there. Regardless of how many books I read.
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| (My bullet journal gives me a reason to buy stickers.) |
Disney Origins Bookclub
Some Instagram friends are hosting a year-long buddy read project of lots of things that Disney movies are based on. Check out #DisneyOriginsBookclub to learn more. I won't be participating every month, but I want to do at least six of the reads.
Diverse Reads
Once again, I intend to try to read 12 books by and/or about people from ethnicities, cultures, and backgrounds different from my own.
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| (The couch in our library, where I often curl up with a book.) |
Here are some fun statistics:
110 books read, total
35 rereads
11 nonfiction
15 diverse reads
6 read aloud to my kids
6 audiobooks
1 e-book
How about you? Got any bookish goals or hopes or dreams or plans?
110 books read! Whew, that's amazing! Look at you go!
ReplyDeleteKatie, I know, right? Like, wut? How did I do that? Possibly magic involved that I wasn't aware of?
DeleteJust hearing that you read that many books makes me tired. I consider myself doing good if I make it to 45. :P
ReplyDeleteCharity, it seems a little surreal to me, to be honest. I'm aiming for 55 again this year because I'm pretty sure 110 was a big fluke.
Delete*The shy person returns* 110 Is a good number! (1 a week would be doable, but I tend to do "book sprints" wherein I find a book that I like and read the series within a week, if I can get my hands on them that fast. So probably averaging out it would be about 55 new books a year, which is something to say.)
ReplyDeleteYou know, I think I have over 100 unread books on my shelves in my room, let alone the whole house. (We have a lot of books.) So I'm not going to attempt that because it would take me a year to count the amount of books that I haven't read.
Sounds like you have a lovely year ahead of you! Have a wonderful new year.
Faramir
Hello again, Faramir! I do occasionally just chow down a book in a couple days (nearly finished with my annual 2-day feasting on The Blue Castle, for instance), but most of the time I read in little dribs and drabs throughout the day.
DeleteWe have about 3,000 books in our house, if you count all the research books, kids' books, everything. The first step of doing #TheUnreadShelfProject is to actually, literally count all of your unread books. Which is why I know exactly how many I have -- and these are the books that I want to read in their entirety, not just things I have for research that I dip in and out of. It did take me a couple days to count them all. Crazy stuff.
Happy New Year!
Then maybe I should count every book in my house, to see how many books there are. (I'll get back to you when I've counted.)
DeleteAnd you said that every book counted, including music books and photo albums? So that will add up to a lot.
(My family is a very bookish, so we have shelves in every room except the bathrooms and the dining room. :) )
Faramir
Faramir, I counted picture books for little kids, but not photo albums or music books. Just books you would read, really. I did not count cookbooks (I have almost 50 of those).
DeleteWe are also very bookish -- we have bookshelves in the living room, kitchen, dining room, library, basement, and all four bedrooms. My dad has at least 5,000 books, most of them theological in nature, and when he built his house to retire into, they had to not put a basement under the room for his library/study because he had too many books for it to be stable if it wasn't on a concrete slab!!!
Love that you blew your original goal to smithereens.
ReplyDeleteI read more then I thought I would too, but not that much XD
Skye, yeah, I kind of shellacked it. Literally read twice as many as I set out to. I do not expect to hit that kind of number again this year, heh heh.
DeleteGood for you for reading more than expected! I always say that even if your goal is just to read one book this year, that is one more book than a lot of people read, so it's a good goal.
Ok, 3 things:
ReplyDelete1.The fact that your son takes fencing lessons is just about the coolest thing ever.
2. I love how you read diverse books written by people who are different from you.
3. I didn't know you bullet journalled! That's cool! So do I. :)
Oh, and also, all your book statistics are mind-boggling. You are an inspiration.
Gabby, I agree! He's wanted to take fencing lessons for a while, and when a place like a mile from our house started offering them, we jumped at the chance. He loves it.
DeleteI try to adhere to the idea that books should be both mirrors and windows -- mirrors to help us learn more about ourselves by reading about people similar to us in some way, and windows to help us learn about people different from us in some way by looking away from our own lives, experiences, and cultures.
I have been bullet journaling since... 2019 sometime? I do it my own way, in a regular journal with lines, not one with dots, but it's been sooooooo helpful for keeping my busy life and many projects on track.
And, thanks! This was an exceptional reading year -- I'm usually more in the 50-75 range.
Wow, you really smashed your reading goals last year! That's awesome.
ReplyDeleteI've also been trying to read at least one book by someone of a different ethnicity per month. It hasn't happened every month, but I'm hoping that I can get into that rhythm in 2022.
Ooh, I didn't know about the Disney Origins thing going on. I'll have to check that out. Thanks!
Olivia, I really did. I am not expecting to do that again this year, lol.
DeleteOooh, I hope you join the Disney Origins group too! I'm in reading group 2...