2021 Reading Goals

One of my favourite things about a new year is setting new goals for myself, both personal goals and reading goals. I try not to put too much pressure on myself with these goals, and will change them throughout the year if I feel like trying to accomplish my goals is causing me to lose the enjoyment of reading. I have quite a few to share with you. Some of these I will keep in mind throughout the year and work on them without thinking about it, others I will completely forget about and we can find out together at the end of the year if I have accomplished them. 

Goodreads Reading Challenge

As always, this is my first goal for the year. I have, once again, set my Goodreads challenge goal at 50 books. I managed to easily read 50 books in 2020 but who knows what this year is going to bring. I do have a bit of an 'out there' goal of 100, we'll see if I manage to push myself.

Buzzword Challenge

One of my favourite booktubers, Kayla from BooksAndLala, created the Buzzword readathon a while ago but has changed it up for 2021. She has compiled a list of buzzwords, one for each month, and these can either be for a week long readathon at the beginning of each month, or as a year long reading challenge of reading one book per month for that month's buzzword. I did a terrible job of explaining that but you can find out more about it here or here. I am going to be trying to read a book a month for each monthly buzzword.

Year Of Smut Challenge

One of my favourite bookstagrammers, RateTheRomance, created a reading challenge for romance and I am so excited about it. There are two bingo boards, the regular boards and the Badass Bibliophile edition. I am starting off with the regular boards, but if I complete that I will challenge myself to be a Badass Bibliophile.

Read From My Physical TBR

This is a goal I have in some form every year. I don't reach for the books I own, I think because they don't reflect my reading tastes as much anymore, but I do still want to give them a go. I've tried setting a myself the challenge of getting my physical TBR down to a certain number by the end of the year, which didn't work. I've tried only allowing myself to buy new books once I had read 5 I already owned, which failed. So, this year I just want to try and read one book each month that I have owned before the beginning of 2021. I also want to try and do the same with the ebooks I already own but that is less of a priority.

Read More Diversely

This is something that I have been saying I want to do for so long now but never really made any conscious effort to change my reading. Looking back on my reading over previous years, I'm ashamed of how few books I have been reading from non-white authors. I want to read at least one book a month by an author that is not white. Obviously I want to be reading more than that, but that is the very least I want to be doing. I am also going to be tracking the diversity of all kinds within the books I'm reading on my reading spreadsheets to make me more aware of what I am reading and how diverse my reads actually are.

Try New Things

One of my favourite goals I have for myself in 2021 is to read one book in a genre/subgenre that is new to me, or a book that is completely outside of my comfort zone, each month. I didn't think adult romance was for me until I gave it a go and now it is my most read genre. I want to discover things I love that I haven't given a chance before.

Participate In Readathons

Readathons are so much fun and a great way to participate in the book community. I have had a blog for six years now and have yet to really be active in the book community in any way. Mostly because, even in an online environment, I am painfully shy. I want to participate in at least one readathon every 1-2 months and try to make myself get involved.

I'm not making any blogging goals this year because I'm not really sure what direction I want to take with my blog in 2021. Part of me would love to make this the year I really put the effort in and try to grow my blog. However, I don't want to put too much pressure on myself this year. Life is hard right now and I need to be nice to myself. So everything is a bit up in the air with blogging, but I will work things out.

What reading goals have you made for 2021? 

Sophie :)