These are my reading intentions for next year
Blogging
As I said last year, I have always tended to think of myself as a reader who blogs rather than just a book blogger. This still stands and with everything that has been happening recently in my family life, I want to rediscover the pleasure of reading. It feels like it takes me much longer to review a book than it does to read it, so I have concluded that I am still going to be reviewing books, but am going to scale back on the number that I write. Any book that has been sent to me for review, or that I have requested, I will write a longer review. Others may get a mini-review in the monthly round-up and fiction and poetry may or may not get reviewed at all.
I have a couple of things lined up on the blog for next year, the first is called A Bloggers Reading Journey, where One or two bloggers each month will tell us about some of the key moments in their reading life to date. The other is that I want to write a blog post each month on something that interests me, rather than just concentrate on reviews.
Books
Review Books
I am forever grateful for every single review copy that I receive. Thank you to all the publishers and publicists that make opening a small rectangular parcel a thrill. I am still happy to be sent books, but I am going to scale back the number of books that I request for some of the reasons mentioned above, I take way too long to get around to reading them and I have run out of space! (A perennial problem for book lovers). Aiming this year to work through some of my backlog too.
My Own Books
I have bought a lot of books in the past year and got a couple more bookshelves too. However, this has not reduced the number of Tsundoku… Am I going to stop buying books? Probably not, but I do need to catalogue, sort and reduce the books that I have so I end up with just the books I want to keep.
Library Books
I do have far too many library books checked out, and I am finding that having a full card means that I don’t get that chance to pick things up at random when I visit the library each week, as there is no room. I have got one card down to 75% but I still have lots of reservations! Improved from last year, but still a way to go.
Reading Plans
I am fairly happy with the mix of books that I am reading at the moment. I read a lot of natural history books in 2022 but felt that I didn’t read enough travel writing. So next year I want to read a roughly equal amount of travel books (I have bought a lot of them after all!!). I also want to read more science fiction and fiction, because, hey, why not? I also have some other intentions detailed below, that whilst not set in stone, I would like to achieve. I also want to have more themed reads, so reading three or four books with a common subject matter. For example, I have several books on London and a few now on Venice and Naples.
Female Authors
This year I have read 72 female authors, which equates to 37%. I am going to set my target to 76 female authors, which is 40%. Given the genres of the books that I read, most seem to be male, it is changing but not fast enough.
BAME Authors
I had my target set to 12 last year and I am going to set the same again for 2023. Slowly more BAME authors are being commissioned in the genres that I like reading, but it is sadly too few still.
Science Fiction & Fantasy
Aiming again to average at least one a month for this. Science fiction is good for expanding the mind and as Terry Pratchett says: Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can.
Fiction
I don’t read or buy a huge amount of fiction, but I do have a lot around that I have acquired or been sent. This year I am going to make an effort to read at least one fiction book a month. I probably won’t review them, but it depends on the book.
Poetry
I didn’t quite reach 18 poetry books in 2022, but I am going to set the same target again. I have decided that unless I am sent a poetry book to review, I will just be reading these for the pure pleasure of reading.
Photobooks
I have bought an awful lot of art & photobooks in the past year (some of which are shockingly valuable) and I want to read some of these books next year. Aiming to read at least one every month.
Literary Awards
Last year I was a bit better at reading some of the shortlisted books from my favourite prizes (as usual). I did manage to read some from the minor prizes too, but still have a long list of books that I haven’t quite got to read yet… The same list of prizes from last year:
Wainwright
Stanford
Royal Society
Baillie Gifford
Arthur C Clarke
I would like to read some of the winners from other prizes too, including:
Republic Of Consciousness Prize
Rathbones Folio Prize
Women’s Prize for Fiction
Jhalak Prize
The Portico Prize
Challenges
I quite like book challenges. It is a way of finding new books that you might not have come across before to fit a particular brief. It kind of follows my philosophy of reading widely and reading deeply.
The World From My Armchair Challenge
My ongoing challenge is to read a travel book set in or that passes through every country, sea and ocean in the world. I have now read 80 of around 220 of the countries and oceans and would like to get to halfway through next year. It has taken much longer than I thought, for a variety of reasons, but it was always going to be a long-term thing.
Nature Challenge
The group that I am in on Facebook is doing another challenge this year that I will probably take part in. I have just about finished this year, but at 45 books was a bit hard going in amongst everything else. Here is the grid:
20 Books of Summer
This is run by the blogger, Cathy of 746 books. I normally sign up to read 20 books and will do so again next summer. I normally end up reading half the 20 that I pledge to do though.
Other Bookish Stuff
Cataloguing Books
Meant to start doing this in 2022, but never quite got around to it. So inevitably I did end up buying a few duplicates by accident as I can’t always remember what I have bought in the past, so really must do this. I have downloaded a couple of apps now for my phone (Book Catalogue, My Library & LibraryThing) and will have a play around with them. I have been adding to a list on a spreadsheet which has helped.
Spreadsheets
I took the plunge and reconfigured the way I do my spreadsheets last February and have a much-improved format that I now use and I have used it for the past ten months. Generally, it works very well and gives me a consistent way of working and extracting meaningful data. Now, I need to tweak it a bit to make it slightly easier to use. I will do a blog post in 2023 showing what I do with them and how the various parts work.
Bookshelves
I need to sort mine out! I have ten full or partly full around the house and as you can probably guess there are books everywhere and whilst some stuff is sorted into the correct locations, there are other bookshelves that have a random collection of stuff. Again, I will try and do a blog post of the state of them and then hopefully another later in the year, and be able to show a bit of organisation on them!
What are your reading intentions or goals for 2023?
Happy New Year! What a set of goals you have. Good luck with them. BTW, the Librarything phone app is great for scanning books!
Happy New Year to you too, Annabel. I have tried to limit them to what I think is achievable. I have got that app downloaded, but not tried t out yet. I do have an account that has a partial GR upload on it so not sure what that would do!
My reading plan for next yeah is to just keep doing what I’m doing. Read any book I can, I won’t buy new books, not visit charity shops to check out the books and always say no to strangers on twitter who offer to send me books…I’ll focus on the first part I expect.
That reading challenge of yours looks tough, Think I would spend a few weeks trying to find books to fill the spots. Good luck matey.
Thanks, Jason. Books in Charity shops are my downfall! You might not be surprised to know that I have a book for every slot on the Nature challenge, and that I have most of them here already!
Nice planning 🙂
The devil is in the detail…
I thought I’d concentrate on the books I have in house. But the Nature Reading Challenge looks interesting, so more books for me to find/buy/borrow. I like that. I look forward to your blog on your spreadsheet.
Thank you, Marcene. I have been meaning to write it for ages as other have expressed an interest in it.
I use LibraryThing although I’m woefully behind and I feel I’ve de-acquisitioned books without noting it on there, too! Oops!
My aims for this year are to get the TBR down and also prioritise hardbacks I buy to read them quickly so I don’t end up leaving them to work their way up the TBR, by which time the paperback has come out! I also want to continue to keep my proportion of books by Global Majority People higher than their proportion of the UK population (which I managed the last two years); I can do this because I read books specifically on issues of race and yes, not because the nature and travel genres are full of such writers! Let’s hope this continues to change.
Happy 2023 reading!
Thank you, Liz. I have made a conscious effort to seek out some of these writers because mainstream publishing isn’t going to hand them to me on a plate. It is starting to change though, I have three travel books by BAME authors to read at some point this year, for example.