Bookmas Day 9 — An Overview of 2015's Reading Challenge

♫On the ninth day of Bookmas, the book blogger gave to me, a year overview, a review for the reading, a bit of Hide & Seek, some festive reads, a post about films, reading recipes, comic book thoughts, a list of writing tips and a book rec for a mystery♫

Welcome to Bookmas day 9! Today we're going to spend some time looking over 2015's reading challenge that I took up at the start of the year. This year, I took up two different challenges (which you can read about here). One was an amount of books, and one was a list of criteria for 43 different types of books.

I think setting goals in your reading is really important and valuable to maintain variety and quantity

in your reading! I have set a reading challenge on goodreads for the last few years, and I find that goodreads is a really good way of maintaining what you're reading and keeping track of different books you've read and want to read. If you don't have a goodreads account, I would recommend making one to kick off next year and begin your more organised reading!

This year, I set a 90 book goal. Last year, I had 100 as my goal, but I only read 90, so I figured that this year I would aim for 90 and beat it if I could. Well, shamefully enough, I didn't hit my goal again. And I failed pretty badly this year, with only reading 71 books as of now. I'll probably finish another few before the end of the year, but definitely not 19. I think this year I fell so badly behind because I was super busy with my own book, and also because I've been in several really bad reading slumps this year. But no matter! I am sharing with you these failures because it is important to acknowledge that we can't always be perfect readers. We are only human! Humans with active lives and responsibilities!

I also didn't quite complete my criteria reading challenge, though I tried very hard. There were only Lord of the Flies, which unfortunately is not over 100 years old. Oops. The next one, "a book that came out the year you were born" was really hard. None of the books I wanted to read were published the year I was born. Apparently my birth year was a really slow year for good books.

four categories I didn't manage to find a book for. The first category, "a book more than 100 years old", was hard because I didn't actually get around to reading many super old classics this year. The oldest book I read, I think, was

Next, "a book written by an author with your initials". THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE! I found it so hard to locate any authors with the initials LS. I even was a bit lenient and would accept LK (my middle name), but alas. I was unsuccessful, which was a bit sad. Lastly, "a play". I didn't actually get around to finding a play to read, partially because I find it pretty hard to read plays just as a casual thing. Although, I was planning to properly read The Importance of Being Ernest by Oscar Wilde, because hello, Oscar Wilde, and that play is hilarious, but I never got around to it.

I'm pretty happy with this success rate in my criteria challenge. It could have been better, this is true, but only missing four is okay with me.

Next year, I plan to have a goal of 90 again. I'm going to try really hard to hit it next year! Additionally, I'm going to search around for a new criteria challenge to do. When I find one, I'll post about it and you can decide whether you'd like to adopt it with me!

If you'd like to discuss challenges and book managing systems, let me know in the comments below or via any of my socials. You can email me (mywordsarearrows@gmail.com) for business, feedback, book recs or just to say hi!

I hope you have found today's post useful, and I'll see you tomorrow for Bookmas day 10 :)

Lily xo