wrapped up in books

Top Ten Tuesday is a book blogging prompt hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. I don’t participate every week, but I join in when I find the prompt interesting. This week is all about setting goals for our reading and blogging lives in 2015.

First, I looked back at my 2014 goals to see how I’ve done.

And even though I haven’t had as much time for reading or blogging as I did in the past, I did pretty well with sticking with them.

Reading Goals

I still want to read what I want. I was great at doing that this year. Even when I set goals and made lists and established priorities, I let myself adapt them and change them as necessary. I’ve still been awesome about maintaining balance. I’ve done well with making graphic novels and audiobooks a regular part of my reading routine.

I had made goals about reading from NPR’s crowd-sourced list of Top 100 Teen Books and Book Riot’s list of 100 books to make you well read, and I’ve since decided that I don’t care. I want to read more backlist, but I’m not going to be so deliberate about what I read other than books I think I will like. I still want to push my boundaries and get out of my comfort zone, but not that way.

I definitely read 12 debuts, and I want to do better about reading more in 2015. If I counted all the picture books I read for my early literacy class, I definite read 200 books, even if my Goodreads says I’m a little under 100.

Blogging Goals

I’ve done well at continuing to make readers’ advisory graphics, and they’ve gotten better! I’m quite proud of this Divergent reading list based on factions, andI also made lots of new Like–>Try–>Why and “If you like…” lists which are all indexed on this page. I plan on making more flowcharts and even more of these types of lists and graphics this year because they are by far the most popular content on my blog.

Although I still love reviewing books, I’m going to do fewer straight reviews and more lists, and just recap monthly what I’ve been reading and only review books that I have something important to say or want to feature. This may mean fewer book reviews, but I think they’ll be better. Reviews are time consuming, and I don’t want to waste time trying to write about books that I really only have a paragraph’s worth of thoughts about.

I didn’t do that well with keeping up with my Feminist Fridays posts this year, and I’d like to do better at consistently writing them even if I can’t manage them weekly. Since I’ve joined a feminist book club, that should help me with ideas for posts. I also want to post link roundups more frequently so I can share other amazing content I find online. Library related posts, whether about library school, library programs, or displays, are also popular, so I’m going to continue to post about them, too.

Last year I made it my goal to start writing for one new outlet, so in addition to my work for NoveList and my posts for The Hub, I also started writing for The Library as Incubator’s Book to Art Club. In 2015 I’d like to get another paid writing gig.

What are your reading and/or blogging goals for 2015?