Ceri Louise Reads

At the start of the year I set myself some bookish resolutions to guide my reading for the year, and particularly with the aim of reducing my massive TBR. I outlined these in a video on my old BookTube channel, which you can watch here, but I thought I’d share them here too, as this is now my main location for talking about books!

Goal 1

Get My TBR down

My TBR was always a little extreme but it seems to get more out of hand every year, despite always having the goal to reduce it. This year I am moving and a) don’t want to move unnecessary books from my current flat and b) have a fiancé who is seriously worried about shelf space when the rest of my books come out of storage. Therefore I am actually really determined to reduce the amount of books I own this year. This will mainly be done by actually trying to read them, with some support from unhauling and the intention to buy less books. 

My physical TBR was at the slightly ridiculous number of 876, while my digital TBR was at a more reasonable 168, giving a total of 1044. My goal is to get the physical back down nearer the 800 mark and the digital closer to 130. As I am averaging over 100 books per year this should be achievable if I primarily read from my backlist and limiting how many books I obtain. Having mixed success so far…

Goal 2

TBR challenges

Each year I set myself a few challenges relating to my TBR to encourage me to read more books from specific categories. This year I’ve stuck with the same categories as last year but updated the lists. I will be writing about each list in upcoming blog posts, but for now I will tell you what the categories are and how many books are included. For the majority of these lists, most of the books are from my owned backlist. The categories are: oldest books on my TBR (20 books); series I want to finish (12 series); books that were given to me (20 books); books from subscription boxes (20 books); read around the world (12 books); and review books (no specific list, but aiming for 2 books per month).

Goal 3

Restart Book Budget

I set up a book budget a few years ago as I realised I was buying a ridiculous amount of books (this was during covid lockdown to be fair to myself!) Last year, however, with all my health problems, I gave up on the budget and let myself comfort buy books. Now my health is a bit more stable again, I thought it was a good time to reinstate the budget, with a few changes to make it work better.

The idea of the budget was to link the number of books I could buy to the number of books I read. Originally the rate was a standard £1 earned for every book read, with the amount increasing depending on the length of the book: books over 500 pages earned £2, over 1000 earned £3 etc. This was fine to an extent, and it worked for a while. This year, however, I decided to use the budget to encourage me to read from my backlist more. The way I’m doing this is to link the budget to the challenges from Goal 2. The standard rate is still £1 for every book I read, but I get an additional £1 for each challenge it meets. If a book continues a series, it will earn me £2, and if it completes a series it will be £3. It is also cumulative, so if a book meets more than one challenge, I get the additional £1 for each challenge it meets. For example, if a book was from a subscription box and is from a new country for read around the world, I will earn £3. If a book was a gift and it completes a series, it will be worth £4. It also doesn’t have to be specifically mentioned on the shortlist for me to get the reward. On top of this I will get a £2 backlist bonus at the end of each month where at least 50% of the books I finish are from my backlist. I may also give myself a bonus at the end of the year for each list/goal achieved, but I haven’t quite decided how that will work yet.

Goal 4

Review More

The majority of books on my digital backlist are books I have received from Netgalley for review. Most of these books have been released already, and I haven’t read or reviewed them yet… and this needs to change. I already mentioned that I am aiming to read two review books per month, but I also need to get better at producing the reviews when I have read the book! Last year I read 10 review books but didn’t manage to write reviews for them on Netgalley until 1st January this year. So there are several aspects to this goal: 1) post reviews online for the review books I’ve read in the last couple of years (there are a few outstanding still!); 2) as mentioned, read 2 review books per month; 3) write reviews within a month of reading the book and post online within 2 months; 4) improve Netgalley ratio to at least 50% by adding reviews to their site (at the start of the year this was at 28%); and 5) avoid requesting more arcs until ratio has improved

Goal 5

Read Diversely

For a few years I have been tracking the diversity of the authors I am reading, based on what information there is about them that is easily accessible online. I started doing this as I realised the majority of authors on my shelves were white British or white American and I wanted to make sure I was hearing from a range of authors of different ethnicities. I then also started tracking author gender, whether they identified as LGBTQ+, whether they had experienced mental illness or other disabilities, and whether they were neurodivergent. Each year I am actively trying to increase the percentage of authors I read who are from marginalised ethnicities and genders (and by marginalised genders I specifically mean not cisgendered as I read plenty of cisgendered women!) Last year 43% of the books I read were written by authors from marginalised ethnicities and 7% were from trans or non-binary authors. I’m hoping to increase both of those percentages this year. If I can increase the percentages for my other diversity markers as well I will, but it’s hard to do all of the things.

Goal 6

Post more frequently

Part of the reason for switching from BookTube to BookBlogging is that due to my health and other commitments I was no longer able to produce content regularly. I was aiming to get back to posting one video per week but I realised that I was unlikely to actually achieve that. But writing takes less effort than filming and editing, so I’m hoping I will be able to write one blog post per week initially, and potentially increase that in the future.

So those are my book-related goals for the year! I’m planning to do regular check-ins through monthly reading wrap up posts and quarterly stats posts so you can see how I am getting on.

Have you set any reading goals for the year?