2021 Goals Review

 It's that time again when we look back at my goals for the past year I realise all of the ways I failed and all of the goals I forgot about. I set quite a few goals for my reading life in 2021 and I know for sure I didn't do so great with some of them. I liked to look back at the goals I set in the previous year before deciding on my goals for the current year as a way of seeing what I still need to work on.

Goodreads Reading Challenge

This is always my first goal every year as I find having a number goal to reach pushes me to keep reading throughout the year. I have set my goal as 50 books for the past 6 years so started of 2021 with that goal again. However, pretty early on I decided to be ambitious and change it to 100 books. This was going well until I got super slumpy and decided to lower it to 75, which is still more than I read in 2020. I did managed to read this goal as I read 80 books in 2021. I'm a little disappointed I didn't manage 100 but I am glad I managed to read more than the year before.

Buzzword Challenge

This was a new one for 2021 and was created by Kayla from BooksAndLala, stemming from her Buzzword Readathon. She compiled a list of buzzwords, one for each month of the year, and the idea was to either complete a readathon each month reading books with the buzzword in the title or, as I did, use it as a challenge to read one book containing the buzzword in the title each month. While this was a bit of a struggle some months, I'm pretty proud that I actually did manage to complete this challenge. 

Year Of Smut Challenge

This is a romance reading challenge that I wanted to do at the beginning of the year but quickly gave up on. I found I was putting pressure on myself to read books to fit a prompt rather than what I wanted to read. I have found that these challenges, at least when they are year long, don't really work for me.

Read From My Physical TBR

This is some thing I make as a goal every year. I have far too many unread books on my shelves, some of which have been there since 2014, and I always make it a goal to focus on reading those books. In 2021 I challenged myself to read at least one book a month from my physical TBR. Noone is surprised that this didn't happen. I only read 11 books from my physical TBR in 2021, which is really not great. 

Read More Diversely

I wanted to make a conscious effort in 2021 to read more books by authors who are not white, as this is something I have not done in the past and felt that it was a very important change. I started off the year doing well with this goal but I'm really ashamed to say I did very poorly the rest of the year. This isn't good enough and I need to do better.

Try New Things

This is one that I just completely forgot about. I wanted to read at least one book from a genre or subgenre that I had never read before each month in order to push myself out of my comfort zone. I tried historical romance for the first time but that was really it. 

Participate In Readathons

I wanted to participate in a readathon every 1-2 months in 2021 in order to become more of a part of the book community online. I have discovered that readathons are not really great for me. I tend to feel a lot of pressure to read and then end up not reading as a result. I think I only took part in two readathons in the year and didn't involve myself in the community in any way during those.

Other than my Goodreads challenge and the Buzzword challenge, I didn't really do great with my goals in 2021. I struggled a bit with my motivation to read at quite a few times over the year so I think a lot of my failure in my goals is to do with me just picking up anything that would make me want to read. I will definitely be looking at these goals and incorporating some of them into my goals for this year.

How did you do with your 2021 reading goals?

Sophie :)