Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week's topic is Bookish Goals for 2025. You can check out other Top Tuesday blog posts here.
This is the third year I have come up with a list of goals for reading and blogging in the next year. The goals for 2025 have been informed by my experiences in 2023 and 2024.
My goals for the year:
- Aim at reading mostly books that I owned before January 1, 2025. My goal is 48 books. This ties in with my next goal...
- My husband and I have a joint goal to not buy any print books before the Planned Parenthood book sale in September. That means 9 months of not buying books.
- Read more graphic novels. We have a lot of unread graphic novels in the house. In 2024, I read one graphic memoir and one graphic novel. I will aim for 8 or more this year.
- Read more novels or short stories in the fantasy genre. Royal Assassin by Robin Hobb is definitely on the list. Also books by Terry Pratchett and Ben Aaronovitch.
- Read more ebooks. I have two incentives to read more ebooks: I have a lot of ebooks, many of which I forget I own, and I bought a Kindle Scribe last year. I read two novels on my Kindle in 2024 and some short stories from a few collections. I need to do better.
- Increase my short story reading. I think I have read more short stories each year over the last four years but I haven't tracked my reading. This year I want to keep track of what I read each month.
- Write shorter book reviews. This has been a goal for several years but I am not giving up. It might help if I come up with template for a mini review to use as a framework.
- Read some longer books. Except for the nonfiction book The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters, most of the books I read in 2024 were between 250-350 pages. I am intimidated by long books and tend to let them sit on the shelves unread. Royal Assassin by Robin Hobb (650 pages), Fellowship Point by Alice Elliot Dark (600 pages), and The Charm School by Nelson DeMille (750 pages) are some possibilities for 2025.
- My last goal, but an important one, is to review this list several times a year and make an effort to catch up in some areas that I have been neglecting. In 2024, I don't think I came back to review this list at all.
Addendum:
I have some authors I want to read more books by. I obviously won't finish the series mentioned any time soon, but I can use this post as a reminder to keep working on them.
- Ross Macdonald (13 remaining books in the Lew Archer series.)
- Ross Thomas (Mostly standalone books; I have only read 3 of his books.)
- Victor Canning (3 remaining books in the Birdcage series.)
- Anthony Price (12 remaining books in the David Audley series.)
- Reginald Hill (10 remaining books in the Dalziel and Pascal series.)
- Ann Cleeves (I will continue reading books from three of her series: the George and Molly Palmer-Jones birdwatching series; the Vera Stanhope series; and the Shetland series.)
- Catherine Aird (20 books in a 29 book series left.)
- Bill Crider (I have 17 more books in the Sheriff Rhodes series to read, but I want to try his other series too.)
- Robert Barnard (He wrote over 40 crime fiction books and I probably have read half of them.)
- Thomas H. Cook (Cook is a new author to me. He was born in Alabama, and several of his books are set in Alabama. I have not read anything he wrote.)
- Thomas Perry (Author of the Jane Whitefield series and The Butcher's Boy series, he has also written a lot of standalone novels.)
- Donald E. Westlake (He wrote a lot of crime fiction, under his own name and under pseudonyms. I have read six of his books.)
15 comments:
I haven't bought any new books in a while - definitely a big money saver! Love the short story ones - I also tend to forget about them but need to get better at tracking! Happy new year, hope you achieve your goals :)
Great goals. You can do it! :)
Nine months of not buying books? That would honestly test me!
Good luck with your plans and goals, Tracy. I think using your list here as a reminder and way to keep up with your progress is smart. Now, 9 months of not buying books....good luck with that too. Don't think I would accomplish that goal. ;-)
These are all very reasonable goals. Good luck with them!
I really want to make time for comic books again. I miss the stories I was so invested in! Graphic novels are up there for me as well. Good luck on your goals!
You've got some fine goals here, Tracy. I've been thinking about how to tackle my TBR, too, whether it's not buying more books or at least reading TBR books first. I don't know if it'll happen, but that's a goal.
Anonymous (NancyElin) - Great goals Tracy, and you've inspiried me to change my Classics Club List that I want to complete by 01.01.2026. I need read 32 more books and instead of 'buying' new books I'm going to substitute the books I have on the list with ONLY books I own! I'm really scraping all the shelves on the Kindle and my paperback bookcase for books published after 1975. This will say me so much money!
Nancy, I don't know how not buying books for 9 months will affect my Classics Club reading. I think I have enough of the books already so I won't run into trouble. It might cause me problems with the Classics Club Spin, but I will wait until the next spin to worry about that.
This sounds like a reasonable set of goals. You mention of Terry Pratchett reminds me that I want to read more Discworld. I've read the Tiffany Aching books (which I think are actually YA) and loved them, so I want to try others.
Goal 9, reviewing your goals, is an excellent one.
Shoto, I never meet all my goals, but I think it is good to assess them every year. So I enjoy doing the list.
Kay, not buying books for nine months means I end up buying a good number of books at the end of the year, so I don't save a lot of money. But it does keep me from making impulse purchases all year long, which I like. Years ago I did a 3 month challenge for not buying books, and at the time I thought that would be impossible. Last year I did not have problems with the nine month book buying ban, so I am hoping it is just as easy this year.
iHanna, thanks for visiting my blog. I enjoyed your post on reading goals.
Last year I did quarterly check-ins on my goals to see how I was progressing. It helped to keep keep me on track, though in the end I did fail at several of my goals.
Pam @ Read! Bake! Create!
https://readbakecreate.com/goals-for-2025-book-and-blog-goals/
Cathy, Last year I did not think I could abstain from buying books that long, but I did prepare for it by buying some books I really wanted to read in December 2023. Plus I have a huge backlog of unread print books that I already own. It works for me now, I am not sure it would have a few years ago.
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