2023 has not been the best when it comes to reading, and certainly not my tracking of whatever reading I did. For 2024 I am setting myself up for a better year, as I have revamped my reading tracker. Something I probably should have done a while ago and certainly before I decided upon my reading goals for 2024. Now that I have put them and the starting numbers in my reading tracker on Google Sheets, I am wondering if I have set myself up for a hard year. I will try for meaningful progress, and be happy as long as I make a good effort.
Read all* gifted books
Sarah, what is going on? You’ve already started with an asterisk on “all”. Why are you not going to be reading ALL of the books you’ve been and will be gifted?
Well good friend I shall tell you. I am accounting for the fact I will likely receive books as gifts for Christmas. Seeing as there is only one week left in the year after Christmas it would be very difficult to have read every book I am gifted for that holiday. The number of books I receive may even go up, as I plan to thin out the items I own and so would likely fill the void with more books. I have many series I started reading and own no additional books in, and many other series I would yet like to start.
Having said that, this is the main culprit in wishing I had cleaned up and organized my reading tracker sooner. I have recently figured out I have 64 unread books I’ve been gifted. If I read them all, this doesn’t leave a lot of room for other books to accomplish some of the other goals I have. I have come close in past years to reading 80 books, but this amount of reading has usually been accomplished with audiobooks, and the gifted books are not audiobooks. They are all physical or ebooks.
Finish 10 series
Finishing 10 series may sound easy enough by itself. But I only have one series where I own most of the books, and they were all gifted to me. For most of the other series I am reading, I would need to track down the next books to read them, and that takes away from reading the gifted books, or books that would help in the other challenges I have set for myself.
I also still need to find a better way of tracking what books of a series I own, and which ones I would need to obtain. Currently, with how my tracker is set up, it is a manual process where if I get a book in a series, I need to manually mark on the series tracker I have it.
0 audiobook TBR
People have had a goal to get down to 0 or 10 books left they own and are unread. This would be an unobtainable challenge for me. However, I don’t have very many unread audiobooks. Or I guess that would be un-listened to books. Assuming I have found all the audiobooks I may have forgotten to add to my TBR, I have 24 un-listened to audiobooks. While I have started a few of these; I have never actually finished them and am very interested in continuing those I started. Poppy War by R.F. Kuang is one of those I started and never finished.
Read 50 owned books
Reading 50 books I already own should be a self-fulfilling prophecy if I make any kind of decent effort at the other challenges. Except maybe the finishing 10 series, since I don’t own many of those books. If I get through all my gifted books though, I will surpass this goal. If I complete all my un-listened to audiobooks, I will be halfway done with this challenge. Yet in past years, I have struggled with this because there is always a shiny new book somewhere from my local library or Everand (formerly Scribd).
Read all priority books
There are several books I would love to read. I keep telling myself I am going to read them. Then for whatever reason my brain comes up with, I don’t read them. Some of the books I have chosen as a priority read in 2024, I’ve had on my TBR for…well, longer than I’ve been tracking reading. I’m pretty sure one is one of the first ebooks I ever purchased.
Of the several books I have been wanting to read, I chose 10 to make a priority. One of them, I am fairly sure has also been on past priority lists and yet has STILL GONE UNREAD. (Bad Pixi.) I will be reading this book this year, or need to come up with some severe punishment if I don’t read it. More on which books I am prioritizing in a later post.
What are some challenges or goals you have set for yourself? I’m hoping yours are not as seemingly hard for you as mine seem to be for me.