My 2020 reading goals

Hi booklovers

 

First things first: Happy 2020. Here's to a year filled with love, great books and lots of chocolate ;-)

 

I haven't had the chance to take a look at my current number of TBR books (to be honest, I'm scared to count them), but I know there are over 100 unread books on my shelves.

 

Last year I participated in the Beat the Backlist challenge and I managed to read about 50 backlist books. This year I want to continue focusing on my owned TBR.

 

When looking at my shelves I noticed there are a lot of unread YA books on there. Over the past two years, I've started reading more adult fantasy and I've ignored my stack of YA TBR books. This year I want to try and do something about that. I've come up with a way to make myself pick up more of those unread books:

 

I've written down all the titles and put them in a jar. I'll pick 3-5 books every month (or every two months, I haven't decided yet) and then read at least 1 (maybe 2) of those during that month/those months.

The reason I'm picking more than one book is that I don't do fixed TBRs. If I were to pick only one book, I'd never get around to it, because as soon as I put a book on a fixed TBR, I don't want to read it anymore.

I'll be posting the books I can choose from and let you know if I've read them, what I thought of them and whether or not I want to continue with the series (if they are part of a series).

 

Hopefully this will help reduce my TBR by the end of the year.

I'm going to be really strict about buying sequels as well. I have to be really convinced I want to continue a series before buying the sequel. That's why I'm going to wait at least two - three weeks before getting a sequel. The reason I'm doing this is that sometimes when I finish a book I want to immediately buy the sequel even though I don't read books in a series back to back. If I wait a couple of weeks I sometimes lose interest in the series, so there's no point in getting the next book. That way I'll hopefully manage my book buying as well.

 

Something else I want to do this year is keep better track of my reading. I've ordered the Novel Companion volume 3 from Little Inklings Design. Hopefully I can keep up with it.

 

I'm also going to try and write more reviews. I'm not making any promises, because school has been extremely hectic the last couple of months and will continue to be hectic during the rest of the school year, but I want to at least give it a try. We'll see how it goes.

 

Finally, I've set my GR reading challenge to 50 books. At the beginning of 2019, I set it to 30 books, but I upped that number to 50 throughout the year. So, this year, I'm just putting it at 50 because I'm pretty sure it's achievable.

 

Have you set yourself any reading goals or do you just go with the flow :-) Let me know in the comments.

 

Bye for now

 

Annelies



2015 reading goals in review.

Hi booklovers

At the beginning of 2015 I wrote a blogpost about my bookish goals and now I want to take a look at the things I accomplished - or failed at :-s 

#1 Goodreads goal => read 50 books => Check = I've read 54 books (actually 58, but again, rereads).
 

#2 Read a classic => I mostly failed this goal, because I haven't read a single classic. But I did read the graphic novel of 'Sense & Sensibility' by Marvel. I know, this is technically cheating, but hey!

#3 Reduce my TBR => Fail: at the beginning of this year I had 114 books on my TBR. At the moment I have 121 :-/ I'm not even going to bother justifying that.

#4 Continue/finish some series: I'm dividing this into different 'categories'.

a) Not continued:

* The Mortal Instruments and the Infernal Devices by Cassandra Clare.
* The Cousin's War and the Tudor Court series by Phillipa Gregory.
* The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan.
* The Death Gate Cycle by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.
* The Inheritence Cycle by Christopher Paolini.
* The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien.
* Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin.
* The Shannara series by Terry Brooks.
 

b) Continued:

* Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas: I've read Heir of Fire, but not Queen of Shadows, but I'm still counting it as continued.
* The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer: Hmm, I haven't read Winter yet, but I have reread Cinder. Does this count as continueing? ;-)
* The Falling Kingdoms series by Morgan Rhodes: I finished Falling Kingdoms and read Rebel Spring and Gathering Darkness, but not Frozen Tides.
 

c) Unhauled:

* The Fallen series by Lauren Kate.
* The Dwarves by Markus Heitz.
 

d) Finished:
 

* The His Fair Assassin's trilogy by Robin LaFevers.

#5 Buy less books than in 2014 => Let's just say I failed this goal too, but only slightly. I've bought less physical books, but more e-books.

My conclusion?
A) What does this tell me: I'm not good at sticking to my set goals.

B) Will I be doing another 2016 goals post? I don't think so, I don't know yet. Maybe I'll just make a TBR of 10 books I really want to read in 2016.

Did you set yourself any goals for 2015 and how did you fare? Are you setting yourself goals for 2016? Let me know in the comments.

Bye for now

Annelies

Series I would like to continue / finish in 2015

Hi booklovers

One of my Bookish Goals 2015 is to continue or finish some of the series that I have already started.

I took a look at my bookshelves and I've realised I have a lot of unfinished series :-s

I'm going to divide this into completed and uncompleted series. This list in no particular order - I just wrote them down as I came across them on my shelves :-)

A) Completed series.

1. The Mortal Instruments by Cassandra Clare - I've read the first four, still need to read books 5 and 6. I was marathoning this series, but after City of Fallen Angels I needed to stop reading it, because I truly disliked that book. I was scared of getting into a reading slump.

2. The Infernal Devices by Cassandra Clare - I've read the first book, still need to read books 2 and 3. I actually started reading the second book, but I wasn't enjoying it after COFA.

3. The Cousin' War series by Philippa Gregory - I've read the first three books completely and I'm about halfway through book 4. I also own book 5 in the series, but not book 6 which was released last year. I'm actually not sure if this is a completed series or not. Tell me in the comments if you know.

4. The Tudor Court series by Phillipa Gregory - I still have to read the sixth book. Again, I'm not 100% sure if this series is complete or not.

5. The Fallen series by Lauren Kate - Actually, I only need to read Fallen in love.

6. The Wheel of Time - by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson - I've been reading this series for almost 10 years now. I've already read books 1 to 10 and then I reread books 1 to 6. But being a non-native English speaker, it takes me a long time to get through such massive books. I started rereading them because I had forgotten about a big part of the story, but I stopped again after book 6 because I was making very little progress.

7. The Death Gate Cycle by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman - I own these books in Dutch and I've read books 1 and 2 of this 7 books series.

8. The Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini - I still need to read the last book in the series.

9. The Dwarves by Markus Heitz - I've read the first book and I'm halfway through the second book. I'm not sure if I'll finish them, because I really didn't like the second book.

10. His Fair Assassin by Robin LaFevers - Bre Faucheux and I've buddy-read Grave Mercy (book 1) last year and I really want to finish this series soon.

11. The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien - I've read the Fellowship of the Ring and part of The Two Towers. I know, I really need to continue this series!

B) Uncompleted series.

1. Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin - Like with The Wheel of Time it's taking me a long time to work my way through these books, but I'm determined to get through them at some point. I've read the first two books and I've started the third one.

2. The Shannara series by Terry Brooks - This series actually consists of several smaller series and together they consist of a huge number of books. I've only read the first book in Dutch. I'm (very) slowly collecting the books both in Dutch and English (because I can't find them all in Dutch apparently.)

3. Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas - I've read The Assassin's Blade, Throne of Glass and Crown of Midnight.

4. The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer - I've read the three books that have already been released.

5. The Falling Kingdoms series by Morgan Rhodes - I'm currently reading Falling Kingdoms.


That makes a total of 15 series I want/need to finish and 1 I probably won't finish. Let's be realistic, I'm not going to continue or finish them all in 2015, but I want to make a start on this list, so I can reduce my TBR pile - which I still haven't counted, btw. Wish me luck.

And the worst part is there are so many more series I want to start. So many books, so little time!

Let me know in the comments if you've read any of these series and which of these I should tackle first.

Bye for now

Annelies