2020 Reading and Blogging Goals

In 2019 I set myself three simple goals - to read 30 books, to read more comics and to review more. Most importantly I gave myself permission to have fun without stressing about deadlines, content schedules or any of the other perfectionist pressures I seem to impose on myself.

Taking the pressure off seemed to have done wonders! I managed to read 81 books (52 novels, 23 graphic novels, 4 novellas and 2 anthologies) with a total of 28,000 pages which made 2019 my best reading year since 2011.

This year I want to continue with keeping things simple and being less anxious about blogging:

Read a total of 40 books:
A total of 40 books should be easily manageable and is slightly higher than my goal of 30 books for the previous year.

Read at least 20 books I already own:
With a nod to 2020 I want to read at least 20 books I already own. I really need to chip away at Mount TBR the number of unread books I own is nearing the 500 mark and must be stopped.

Buy fewer books & read books within 2 months of buying them:
In 2019 I spent WAY too much money on books. I blame it on getting into comics. The largest proportion was spent on my steadily expanding collection of omnibus/collected editions. I thought books were expensive in South Africa, but comics are even MORE expensive. (Graphic novels only made up 38% of my purchases, but amounted to 77% of my total expenditure).

I purchased a total of 76 books during the year (47 novels and 29 graphic novels), but only managed to read 13 of them. This means I'm buying far more books than I'm actually reading. This year I want to read newly purchased books within 2 months of buying them in order to curb Mount TBR's exponential growth. This should also help keeping down the amount of books I buy (hopefully!)

Start doing quick reviews:
I tend to put off reviewing books unless they are review copies I received from publishers. In order to be able to do more reviews and actually review more backlist titles from my own shelves I'm going to try to start doing quick reviews. These reviews will be short, 2 paragraphs or less, and should be easier to write and post. Basically wrap-ups of books I didn't do full reviews for.

Here's hoping that 2020 will be filled with awesome books.

Let's do this!