My 2020 Reading and Blogging Goals

With a new year comes a new start and a chance to reflect on your goals. Personally, I’ve never been more excited to start a new year. For me, 2019 was a wild ride of a year, containing both the best days of my life thus far… and the worst. I’m grateful to have a chance to reset.

Today, I thought I would start that off by talking about my goals for the year—well, the ones related to reading and blogging, anyway. I do have other goals for other parts of my life, but since this is primarily a book blog, I didn’t think it was necessary to mention them here.

Anyway, let’s get started, shall we?

Blogging

I don’t have very many goals related to this blog. I know some people like to set goals for things like blog or social media followers, which is great for them, and it’s probably super useful for people who do this as their job. Personally, though, I’ve never liked the idea of setting those kinds of goals, mainly because I really don’t have any control over how many people decide to follow me. All I can do is create content I like and hope that other people like it too.

With that in mind, both of my blogging goals are related to my content.

Publish at least 52 blog posts

This goal is a slight reframing of my goal from last year, which was to post once a week. I did pretty good with that for the first half of the year or so, but then I went back to school for the fall 2019 semester, and my time for blogging disappeared. So this year I decided to give myself a little more leeway for those weeks where it’s just not possible to get a post published.

Ideally, though, I would like to post once a week, and if I can do that on a regular schedule, that would be even better.

Write one book review per month

If you’ve been around for a while, you probably know that I’m terrible about writing reviews. I did post a review not too long ago, back in November, but the only reason that happened was because I was participating in a blog tour.

I really want to get better about writing reviews, though. The whole reason I started this blog in the first place was to discuss books with other people, since I don’t have very many people in my real life who like to read. So I’m going to do my best to review at least one book every month.

Reading

Those are all my blogging goals. I told you there weren’t very many.

For reading, though, I actually have quite a few goals, so let’s get into them.

Read 50 books

This is my main reading goal for the year. It’s the same as last year’s, which, considering I failed that pretty miserably (I only read 35 books), you might be wondering why I didn’t lower it.

The thing is, I know I can do it if I just put some actual effort into it (in 2019, I spent most of the year battling a reading slump). In 2018, my goal was to read 30 books, and I read 45—I know I can read 5 more.

Get into a daily reading habit

One of the biggest reasons why I didn’t meet my reading goal last year was because I wasn’t making reading a priority. Especially in the second half of the year, I would go for weeks without even glancing at a book unless it was for school. Even when I felt like reading, I wouldn’t, for whatever reason, and instead I’d hop on YouTube or Netflix or Disney+ and rewatch the same stuff I’d already seen a thousand times before.

This year, I want to break that habit, so I’ve decided that I’m going to get myself into a daily reading habit. Ideally, by the end of the year, I will have a dedicated time every single day that I spend reading (it’ll probably either be first thing when I wake up or right before I go sleep—or maybe both—but I don’t know exactly when yet).

Participate in at least 5 readathons

I love readathons. During the second half of 2019, readathons were some of the only things that motivated me to read. I’d honestly like to participate in as many of them as I possibly can, but I think 5 is probably a good start.

If you have any suggestions for readathons I should try, let me know down in the comments! I’m always looking for new ones.

My last few reading goals are about the kinds of books I want to be reading this year.

Read 5 books by diverse authors

Last year, one of my goals was to read 5 books by writers from countries other than the US. That was an okay goal, but I didn’t really think it through. First of all, I didn’t end up completing the goal—though that’s not saying much, since I only completed one of the reading goals I set for myself last year. The reason I didn’t complete it, though, was because I realized it was poorly phrased. My intention with the goal was to encourage myself to read more diversely—books by people of color, LGBTQ+ people, etc.  Instead, though, I only successfully read 3 books that “counted” toward the goal, and two of them were Harry Potter, which weren’t exactly the diverse books I was going for. Anyway, I changed the goal to make it more specific.

Read 1 book in French

Some of you may know that I am a French major at my university. I’ll most likely be reading books in French for school, but I don’t count required readings toward my yearly reading challenges.

However, I’m set to graduate this spring, and I want to keep improving my French after I graduate. This is one of the ways I plan on doing that. If I could read more than just one book in French, that would be great, but I’m setting the bar low for now.

Read 1 nonfiction book

This one is self-explanatory, I think. For most of my life, the only times I’ve read nonfiction were for classes, never really for fun. I want to try to branch out a little this year, so I’m starting small with just making it a goal to read one. I have no idea what I want to read though, so if you have any recommendations for nonfiction I should read, I’d be happy to hear them!

Those are all I had for this post today! Let me know down in the comments what your reading goals are this year.

Thanks for hanging out with me, everyone! I’ll see you next time.

-Ariel