Book Goal: Finished

I completed my book reading goal today, officially. I met my # count a few books ago and today I’m at 82 books read so far this year, and all of my different subsets complete: 7 nonfiction, 3 “classics”, 10 paper books I already owned, 5 non-romance, 5 diverse authors, 6 kindle already own, and 5 childhood favorites. I have some thoughts on the whole thing. 

At the beginning of the year it seemed like such a fun challenge and I was excited to find books to fit in each of the categories. It ended being a bit of a bother because I felt I couldn’t always read exactly what I wanted to stay on track with the goal. Hitting 78 books was never really the problem, but getting them in the categories did end up taking some thinking about and pushing off other books. 

I have 958 books on my kindle currently and a lot of them are unread. Going through my kindle was like taking a trip back in time and I can see periods of my life in those books. A lot of books I have read had forgotten about and others I remember buying them and thinking I absolutely had to read them and now I look at them and my tastes have changed and I’m not interested at all. I didn’t even look through all of them to pick out stuff to read so I know there is probably so much I have completely forgotten I have there. 

I do have quite a few paper books sitting on my shelves that I haven’t read and some of the books I really thought I would read this year, just never really appealed. And a couple of them felt like a huge weight was lifted because I finished them. I finally read Circe by Madeline Miller which I had purchased, purged, and repurchased. And now I’m keeping because it was so good and gave me things to think about. LOL

I really like reading non-fiction and will keep reading it. Finding diverse authors was interesting. I did have to make an effort, but there is so much out there to choose from. I initially thought that finding 5 non romance would be hard because I gravitate to having a little bit of romance in the majority of the stuff I read. Turns out it wasn’t that hard. 

I picked some good childhood books to re-read and a couple of them I still love so much. I was surprised to find that Harriet the Spy had a good bit of fat shaming in it which I never noticed it as a kid. I still have all the nostalgia but not sure that one really holds up so well. 

I did find myself looking for smaller books, just so I could keep up, especially with the classics. I didn’t want big tomes this year. It kind of feels like cheating although there is nothing wrong with books of any size. 

So I’ve decided next year there are no goals. It’s going to be a free for all and I want to see where it takes me. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to try new things, but I want to feel free to put books down if they aren’t working, or pick up a really big novel that takes me a month read. I still have a bunch of books on my shelf that I never purge because I’m going to read them “one day”. Well maybe that day will come next year. So my Goodreads goal will probably be somewhere between 12-24 books. Very small just because I like to click on that link and look at my books but I don’t want it to feel restricting at all because I just want to read whatever, whenever. 

Now I’m going to spend this snowy, wet evening with my Christmas lights on and re-reading comfort books and celebrate that I hit my goal and it was good for me to do this year. I found new books and authors and old favorites, which was really the whole point of it all.