With the beginning of a New Year, it seems a good time to set some reading goals. I don’t want to be prescriptive about the number of books I read (I usually aim for about 100 overall, but I won’t mind particularly if I don’t manage it), but I do have some general aims for the year.
- Read more intentionally. I want to be more selective about reading (and buying) books that I will actually enjoy, rather than just reading books I feel I should be interested in. I also want to make more an effort to actually finish books, rather than being distracted by other things and ending up abandoning them.
- Re-read more books. (This ties in with the above goal, too.) Last year I re-read six books (one of which was unintentional, as I didn’t realise I’d already read it until after I started reading it), and I’d like to re-visit at least twice that number this year.
- Read at least 12 non-fiction books. I do read a fair bit of non-fiction so this shouldn’t be too much of a challenge, but I do have quite a lot of unread non-fiction titles on my shelves.
- Read at least one book by Charles Dickens. I’ve only read A Christmas Carol and half of Great Expectations. I’ll probably re-try Great Expectations, but I also have A Tale of Two Cities and Oliver Twist on my shelves, so they are also options.
- Re-read a Jane Austen novel. I read all of her novels between 2011-2013, but have so far only got around to re-reading one. This year I definitely intend to revisit at least one more; probably Pride and Prejudice or Mansfield Park (or both).
- Read more longer books. I tend to put off reading these even if they are books that I really want to read. So this year I’m going to aim to read at least a few of the chunksters on my shelves. I’m not going to set a specific target, but I’d be quite happy even if I only manage one or two.
- Finish the year with fewer unread books on my shelves than the number with which I started it. I failed overall at this last year, but I have been doing better lately – both at buying fewer books and at reading some of the ones that have been sitting on my shelves for a long time. Hopefully I’ll continue this trend into the New Year.
