Bookish Reading Goals 2024

Hello, and Happy Tuesday:) If where you are is like many areas in the US, there’s been a deluge of winter weather coming through, and pretty fiercely. Here we don’t get so many winter storms but we do get dreary rain, a lot of the melancholy type of slow drizzling rain. A nice kind of weather for reading and not much else.

I’ve seen a lot of posts recently about reading goals for 2024, and I got inspired to write my own. I’ve never done this before, actually sit down and think about what I hope to accomplish with my reading in a year. Having writing goals is something I’ve done for a long time (I usually don’t meet them lol), but never reading goals. It is interesting to think about what kinds of things I’d like to focus on as a reader, since to me reading is one of the nicest and best things you can do for your mind and your spirit. In a time when things in the world feel out of control, with so much suffering and pain everywhere you look, reading offers that temporary escape from reality.

It was a good exercise for me to muse what I value as a reader. It made me think more about what I want to work on as a writer. Ultimately, the two are more alike than they might seem initially. I know that it’s almost February so I’m kind of late to the game on this, but there is still a lot of year left and plenty of time to try to work on some of these goals. So before I go on and on, here are some of the things I’m hoping to work on this year 🙂

1) Read More

This is something that I always fall short on. I want to read more! I love reading, and I try very hard to knock out more books from my TBR list every year. But the list grows without much progress, and I always end up feeling like I want to read a lot more. Listening to audiobooks has been very helpful for me, as it lets me listen to books while I get things done around the house. So, hopefully I’ll get a lot more reading done in 2024!

2) Expand My Reading List

I tend to gravitate to many of the same authors, books and genres, and I want to make an effort to expand my reading. I tend to get stuck in patterns, and grab similar things just for the sake of it being easy. It can be hard to research and discover new books, and I can be lazy about trying. But this year I’d like to try new things and reach for some books I wouldn’t ordinarily reach for.

3) Meet More Fellow Readers

I love the passion and dedication of the book community, and I want to meet more book enthusiasts! It’s really helpful to me to learn about new books and see what other people are reading and enjoying. It makes the search for that next read even easier and more rewarding. With that being said, if you are a book lover who wants to share good books, I would love to connect through Goodreads or Bookstagram!

4) Join More Reading Challenges/Participate in a Book Club

This one goes with point #3. With the exception of the Goodreads yearly book challenge (which by the way I never finish successfully haha), I tend to not share too much of my reading journey with anyone or participate in anything. But I want to change that. I think it seems like a lot of fun to join a book club, and to join more reading/blogging challenges. I signed up to play UNO on Goodreads this year, and it’s been fun matching up books to cards and pushing myself to try some new books I hadn’t yet found the time to read. I’d like to sign up for more events and groups, it makes reading more fun.

5) Review More

Authors depend on reviews, and I want to take more time to leave positive reviews for the books I really like. I tend to stay away from leaving reviews if I don’t like the book, but if I do enjoy it then I want to make the effort to help the author and other readers find titles they might enjoy.

That’s what I have so far! More goals will probably come to mind throughout the year, but these are some of the things I would like to focus on for my 2024 reading journey.

How about you? Do you have any reading goals for this year? What kinds of books have you been reading this year, and do they differ from last year’s? What books are you hoping to get around to this year?

Hope you’re having a great week, keep reading!

-Winter