2017 Reading Goals + Challenges

So I'm back and super late with this post. I told myself that I was going to get better with my blogging but with my current living situation I haven't really felt motivated to keep up it. I'm probably going to be in the same living space for at least a couple more months but it could end up being longer so I'm not going to make any promises about being consistent. In order to help myself have some content going up here I have been sharing some of my Youtube videos here. I'm here today to post about my reading goals and challenges I want to participate in this year.

Reading Goals

1. Goodreads Goal: I have set my goodreads goal to 20 books for the year. I decided to do this for two reasons. First, I want to focus in on my writing. I have been talking about how I want to be a professional writer but I haven't written anything in about a year now. I figure by cutting back on a set number of books I want to read this year I will be encouraged to write more. The second reason is I don't want to feel the pressure to read a lot of books. The last couple of years I feel like I've been focused on the amount of books I read so I'm just keeping my goal at a number that I know I will most likely surpass.

2. Read more of the books I already own: This goal is pretty self-explanatory. Last year I bought so many books. The amount of books I was buying and the pace at which I was reading was not balanced so I ended the year with a lot of unread books. In order to stay on track I would like to read at least 5 of my own books before I purchase another one.

3. Diversify my reading: I feel like this will probably be on a lot of people's list of goals this year. Not only do I want to read a range of diverse subjects but I want to read books that are marketed towards different age groups, genres, location of origin, etc (basically read more than just YA). I feel like so far this year I have been doing a good job with picking up different kinds of books and I want to keep it up.

4. Read at least 1/2 of the series I own: While I was packing up my books to put in storage I realized I owned a good number of complete series or series that would be ending this year. I would really like to get through the majority of those series if possible within this year. Since most of my books are currently in storage it's hard to do that right now but I do have some complete series with me so I will focus on those for now and hopefully later in the year I can make more progress.

5. Read all my past Owl Crate books: Another thing I realized while packing up my books is that I haven't read any of the books I received through Owl Crate. I have been subscribed to this box for a little over a year and I haven't read a single book that I received from them! Since this is the year I am trying to read more of the books I own this is definitely a goal I would like to fully complete.

Reading Challenges

Around the Year in 52 Books

I started this challenge halfway through last year and even though I didn't complete the full challenge I think I did really good. I thought this was a fun challenge and an easy way to get me reading some books that I might not normally read so I decided to try this challenge out again this year.

I found out about this challenge at the end of 2016. After doing a little research, I thought this challenge would be perfect since I wanted to focus on reading books I own and starting this year they would all be considered Backlist books. Since I have my goodreads goal set at 20 books I'm just going to say that I want to have the goal for this challenge be to read 20 backlist books. I'm sure I'll read more than that though! If you want to follow along with the books I end up reading check here.