Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Ten Bookish Goals For 2015

I'm participating in Top Ten Tuesday with "The Broke and the Bookish"! :) This week's prompt is: What are your bookish goals for 2015?




1. Keep clearing out my TBR shelves. 

For almost six months, I've managed to keep my TBR shelves contained to just the first two on my bookshelf. But now books are slowly being added to the collection and there's hardly any room left. I've had to stack books on top of each other to make them all fit. (At least I haven't had to put any on the floor yet, though if I don't get on it that's the next step.) I'm going to read as many of the books on there as I can over the next year. I feel like 2014 was the year of writing and editing. To balance it out, 2015 will be the year of reading!


2. Review more books. 

Lately I've just been reviewing ARCs, but I really should be reviewing other books, too. I have so much fun doing it! I'm not sure why I haven't been, but I'm going to change that.

3. Read the books I've been saying I'll read for the past six months.

Throne of Glass, Anna and the French Kiss, The Raven Boys, Code Name Verity, Looking For Alaska, Landline, and Paper Towns are all books I've said I'll get to "ASAP." I read Paper Towns, but the rest are still on my shelf, giving me dirty looks.

4. Read the books from my Goodreads TBR list.

This is similar to #1, though not nearly as bad. I only have 31 books in my TBR list on Goodreads, and some of them haven't even been published yet! (I'm starting to wonder if the sequels to The Host will ever come out.) But I do want to read them, and soon.

5. Resist the urge to add dozens of books to my already crammed TBR shelves.

I don't have high hopes for this one, but I'm going to try!

6. Stop getting distracted (or at least get less distracted).

It sometimes takes me a month to finish a book. It's not because I'm a slow reader (I'm actually a really fast reader), but I get distracted a lot. A shiny new book presents itself to me at the library and I just have to take it home with me and read it right away. Or I need to stop reading the book so I can finish one for my book club. This goal is one of the more manageable ones from my list.

7. Return to my favorites.

This year I branched out a lot, in books and TV. I read classics, I read sci-fi, I read mysteries, I read books that none of my blogger friends had read or reviewed (sometimes going into a book completely blind is fun), I read non-fiction, I read books I didn't think I'd like and ended up loving, and I fell completely in love with many new TV series that I never in a million years would have watched if they hadn't been recommended to me. So this year, I want to go back to some of my favorite genres. I'm a little sick of dystopian at the moment, but I will be returning to my all-time favorite genre, fantasy, starting with Throne of Glass (for real this time).

8. Finish my Harry Potter trivia game.

I've looked everywhere for a Harry Potter trivia board game and found one, but it was only questions from the Sorcerer's Stone. So I'm making one of my own that includes questions from all seven books. It's taking me a while, but I plan to finish it sometime next year..

9. Read/review a book from a debut author.

It's got to be hard for a debut author to break into the reading world when absolutely nobody has heard of her. I want to make an effort to find at least one new author and read/review her book. I know I'd appreciate it.

10. Read more middle-grade.

I don't read enough middle-grade, and I really like it. This year I found some real gems: Flora & Ulysses, Mr. Lemoncello's Library, Because of Mr. Terupt, El Deafo, Out of My Mind, The Fourteenth Goldfish. Yeah, there were some duds, but for the most part they were all really good, sometimes even better than the YA stuff I was reading. I'd love to read more middle-grade in 2015.

What are your bookish goals for the new year?

5 comments:

CG @ Paper Fury said...

THESE ARE GOOD GOALS! I want to read more MG too. ;-) I tried to read more adult last year and ha ha ha that failed badly. I think I read 4 adult books?? And half of them were like The Bear and The Girl With All The Gifts which were narrated by kids anyway! MY BAD. lol I think my biggest goal of 2015 is NOT to have a towering tbr. Wish me luck. 0.0

Unknown said...

Ooh, what great goals! The goal to not add so many books to your TBR is a good one, and I wish you luck! ...but I'd so not be able to stick with it, haha. ;) I'm coming to accept that my Goodreads to-read list will likely ALWAYS boast hundreds of titles, and I'm probably just going to have to deal with not reading all of the great books in the world, haha. As for you, though--definitely do read The Raven Boys and Code Name Verity!! Both of them are absolutely INCREDIBLE. (Like you, though, I still haven't read Throne of Glass, and I've been told I need to remedy that, haha.)

Also! If you're looking for 2015 debuts, I've got a Goodreads shelf of books coming out in 2015, and a lot of them--possibly even the majority of them--are debuts. (THEY SOUND SO GOOD.) A lot of them are contemporary fiction, so that kind of goes against the whole "read more fantasy" thing, but if you like you can check it out here. :)

The Magic Violinist said...

@Cait LOL, maybe you're just not ready to leave your childhood behind yet. ;) An adult book I haven't read yet, but heard is good, is Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. And it's been turned into a movie!

Good luck! You will definitely need it. We all will. :P

@Taylor Lynn Ha ha, thanks! ;) I've already added two books to my Goodreads and we're barely a week into 2015, so I don't have much hope for that goal, but it's always worth it to try.

Both are high up on my list to read! (Yeah, I'm pretty sure everyone who hasn't read ToG yet has been told to read it immediately.)

Ooh, might take you up on that. :) Reading everyone Top Ten Tuesday posts has been helpful for that, too.

Boquinha said...

"Stop getting distracted (or at least get less distracted)." You call that manageable?!? Please tell me your secret!!

#9 is so sweet.

My TBR pile is ridiculous and always growing. Daddy getting me 25 graphic novels for Christmas gave me an instant pile!! I'm ITCHING to start those!!

The Magic Violinist said...

@Boquinha Ha, apparently it's not so manageable, because I'm three months in to the new year and I'm reading about seven books at once. XD