It’s the end of the year, which is my absolute favorite for several reasons: my birthday, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, AND GOAL SETTING! I love making lists and goals, and nothing makes me happier and more inspired than the start of a new year. 😍

This year, I wanted to break my reading goals apart from my regular life goals. Normally, I’d just set a goal to aim for a certain number of books as a single goal, but I wanted this year to be a little different – so I added a few more specific ones!

2019 Bookish Goals

• Read 1 book I haven’t read Stephen King each month. I vowed to do this starting from my last birthday, and have so far been doing pretty well! I’ve read ELEVATION and MISERY, and I’m about to start a buddy read of CARRIE this month!
• Participate in more group/buddy reads. I’m off to a good start with this one – I have a 7 month readalong of the Harry Potter series planned (#youreawizardreadalong), and will also be participating in a group read of the Dark Tower Series (#allthingsservethebeamin2019), hosted by my friend Jo! I plan to pepper the year with a few others, all of which I’m sure I’ll be just as excited for!
• Read a total of 100 books. I aimed for the same number this year (and met the goal!), so I think a repeat of the same would be fun without being too challenging considering what I have planned for the rest of 2019.
• Keep up with ARCs before they release. I unfortunately fell slightly behind this year due to how many of these I accepted at once. Now I’m learning to be a bit more micromanage-y with my time, and it’s paying off – early 2019 will be devoted to reviews of ARCs I’ve received recently!
• Chip away at my TBR shelves each month more than adding to them! This is a big one for me – and one I failed miserably at in 2018, if I’m being honest. I’m hoping that if I read a lot, I won’t have to worry much about this one. 😛
• Complete more of my Stephen King Hodder colored spine collection. Self-explanatory!
• Read more books published before 1950. According to my Goodreads stats, in the last couple of years, I’ve only read 6 books published prior to that! I’ve focused on more new releases, but I would like to add 1 – 2 classics to my TBR each month to help even things out a bit.
• Read more diversely, intentionally. This year I noticed that a majority of the authors I read were white men – and while that’s fine and I discovered some really great new authors (and continued to love some ones I already knew!), I would like to be more mindful of bringing more diversity to my reading – books written by (and about) more women, people of color, about different cultures, etc.
• Track my reading! I’ve borrowed and edited a spreadsheet by Kaleena @ Reader Voracious, and will be tracking several things in 2019: ARCs, reviews, author gender, ratings, # of books read, money spent on books, genres, group/buddy reads, and more! I’ve started using the spreadsheet this month to test different parts of it out, and so far, I’m loving it!

I can’t wait to see how the charts look at the end of the year!!

Have you made any goals for next year? Even if it’s just to read a single book, that’s pretty great! Wish me luck in mine – I’ll probably need it, lol.