January | 2023 | socially awkward bookworm.

Hey!

I hope you’re having a great start to the new year. I can’t believe the first month of the new year is almost over! I thought I would once again post my reading/blogging goals for the year. I know this post is so late though, oops. 😛 Some of these goals may be repeats or similar from last year, because I really want to continue to stick to those goals this year as well or finally accomplish them if I haven’t in past years. I’m keeping my goals list short this year, because 2022 was a really difficult year as far as reading and blogging go and I don’t want to overwhelm or stress myself out this year.

2023 Goodreads Challenge. My Goodreads challenge goal for this year is to read 25 books. I lowered from 50 to 25 this year because last year I didn’t complete the challenge and my reading habits have changed quite a bit over the last couple of years to where I am not reading as much as I was before. I figured a smaller goal of 25 books would be good for me. I don’t have to stress too much and it’s more attainable. I am already doing REALLY well this month with reading, so I’m hopeful I’ll complete this goal this year. *knock on wood* 😛

Read 10 of my older books. I have so many books that I own and a lot of them are unread, sadly. I buy more books than I read as I’m sure a lot of us bookworms do. I want to read at least 10 of my older books this year. I almost completed this goal last year of reading 20 of my older books, but since I was barely reading at all I didn’t complete this challenge. I’m lowering the number this year since I lowered my Goodreads challenge. I am hopeful that I can accomplish reading 10 of my older books this year! For this reading goal, they have to be books that I bought in previous years. So, books that I buy this year do not count toward this.

Finish at least two book series. I’ve started quite a few books series that I never got around to finishing over the years. This year I want to put a little more focus into doing just that! So, I think I’ll start with a goal of finishing at least two of those series. At this point I am not sure which ones yet, but I’ll keep you post!

Declutter bookshelves & Kindle. I own A LOT of books. There are books on my shelves and my Kindle that I probably will never get around to reading, lost interest in reading, and books that I didn’t like. There’s a local bookstore that I can donate them to for store credit, which is nice. There’s a lot a couple Free Little Libraries around town that I can share there too. I think doing this will make me feel a little less guilty or stressed that I have so many unread books. This will also give me the chance to reorganize my bookshelves, because I’ve been wanting to do that.

Be more active. I really want to try this year to be active more on my blog with posting more and coming up with new content to post. I also want to connect with you more again! I know I haven’t been around much over the last few years and last year was REALLY bad with being here. Hoping to be more present. 🤞🏼 I really enjoy blogging and have met so many amazing friends in the book community, so I am hoping that I can get back into the swing of things again. I miss you guys! 🖤 I’ll try to hop on once a week if I can to catch up with you. Of course I hope to be on more than just once a week, but starting slow and hopefully my spark for blogging with come back.

There may be new or smaller goals that pop up throughout the year and that’s fine. This is just a list of the main goals that I really hope to stick to and achieve for 2023. Reminder to myself: no pressure if you don’t, it’s okay!

What are some goals you have for this year? Feel free to link me to your posts if you have one!

I need to work on my January wrap up, January book haul, and a couple blog posts about the books that I read in 2022. So, you’ll definitely see more from me on the blog soon. 🙂

I’ll end this post with a couple pictures. My husband and I went to Savannah, GA to visit a week ago and I stopped at a couple bookstores (of course). One of the bookstores I went to was called A Book Lady Bookstore. It was pretty cute and so many books! Here are a couple of pictures I took at that bookstore.

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In case you missed it;
2022 Year in Books.

I hope you have a great day and weekend! 🙂

Happy New Year!

I know I am late in posting my 2022 year in books update, but what else is new? I’ve been posting everything ridiculously late this past year, sadly. 2022 was definitely NOT my year as far as reading and blogging goes. It has been pretty sad thinking back to last year and how much reading I wanted to do, but just didn’t get to do. I was stuck in a HUGE reading slump that took over the second half of the year. I started doing more at my job that cut into how much time I could actually listen to audiobooks, so that made me take a hit as well with finishing books; especially since 2022 was the year I listened to mostly audiobooks. I filled most of my downtime with video games because it was hard for me to focus on reading books. I am hoping this year will be different and I’ll have a better balance between reading, video games, and life in general. But enough of that for now, let’s get into my 2022 year in books wrap up. In this post you’ll find updates on my Goodreads challenge, some different types of charts of what I read, and a recap on how I did with my reading goals that I made at the start of 2022.

My Goodreads reading challenge was to read 50 books in 2022…

33 books read for challenge.
25 of those were audiobooks.
6,925 pages read.
4 books I DNF
(DNF books are not counted in my Goodreads challenge totals)

As you can see above, I failed my Goodreads challenge for the first time since I’ve started participating in it seven years ago. 😦 I was so bummed about it, but I was just not reading much this year. Toward the middle of the year it was hard for me to pick up any books or listen to any audiobooks as I mentioned above. There were two months out of the year that I didn’t finish a single book. Work got busier and after work I was just so drained from the day that reading was not my number one priority. I wanted mindless things to do instead, so I played games or watched tv. Fingers crossed 2023 goes better with my reading challenge, I plan to lower my goal for this year.

Now let’s get into some different charts about the books that I’ve read and listened to this year. I started using StoryGraph last year because it was easier to get graphs made for me through out the year instead of having to make them all myself like I did the previous year. Plus, there’s a lot more variety in charts and categories. Before I get to the charts, I’ll start off with my rating scale, so you can get an idea of how I rate books. I don’t do half star ratings and I use Goodreads’ rating system with how I rate the books that I read. It’s simple and works for me. Below is how Goodreads has their star ratings set up.

5 stars – it was amazing
4 stars – I really liked it
3 stars – liked it
2 stars – it was ok
1 star – did not like it

This first chart will show you an overall look at my start ratings of all the books that I read this year and the second chart will show you the different “moods” of the books that I read. I really liked looking at the mood chart and seeing all the different moods in the books that I read. Emotional books were the winner this year! It was also interesting seeing that of all the books I read, the average rating was 3.76 stars. I think I was really picky with giving out five stars or because of the reading slump, nothing was really blowing me away.

The next chart will show the format of the books that I read being audiobook, e-book, and print books. Audiobooks were definitely the winner in this category! The chart after that will show the type of books I read being either fiction and non-fiction. I read a lot more fiction than non-fiction, but that’s usually how it goes every year.

format2022books fiction:nonfiction2022books

And finally, this chart below shows the different genres I read this year. There were a lot of different ones, but a few were the stand outs as you can see below. Young Adult, Romance, and Contemporary were the top three of the year!

Now onto my 2022 reading goals and whether I think I accomplished them or not. You can check out the actual post I made in January 2022 of my goals over here, but here is just a small recap of what they were. That post has longer explanations of what each of these goals were.

2022 Goodreads Challenge. As mentioned above, my Goodreads challenge was to read 50 books in 2022. I only read 33 books, so, it was a fail. 😦 My goal for this year is going to be a lot less though. Over the last couple years I haven’t been reading as much, so I am going to do a smaller more realistic goal for me right now.

ARCs/no ARCs. This goal was to not request any (or many) ARCs and to focus on reading the ones that I had pending from 2021. This goal was 50/50 completed. I did not request any ARCs at all, but I also did not get around to reading all of the pending ARCs that I had and get my reviews up for them. I had six pending ARCs; I read two of them and only reviewed one of the two. I may try to read the other four this year, but I won’t hold myself to that. I think I just want to start fresh and do better this year for any future ARCs and reviews.

Read 20 of my own older books. This goal was to read any books that I bought before 2022. I did not accomplish this one either, sigh. BUT I got close! If I would have read more books this year and accomplished my reading challenge, I 100% would have since I read 14 older books! So, I’m not too upset about this one.

Declutter bookshelves & Kindle. For this goal I wanted to go through my bookshelves and donate books I wasn’t going to read or books I didn’t really like. I also wanted to delete books from my Kindle that I didn’t like and books that I didn’t think I would ever read. I never got around to doing this. I plan to try again this year though.

Write more reviews. As the goal says, I wanted to review more books on my blog. Total fail! I think I only wrote one review in 2022, oops. I wasn’t reading much and when I did read, I just didn’t have the motivation to review what I wrote.

Be more active again. My last goal for 2022 was to be more active on my blog and as you guys probably noticed, I was not on here so much. I’m sad that I failed this one the most because I feel SO disconnected from the blogging community and love you guys and love catching up with you. I think once COVID began, it just changed everything and I haven’t really been the same since as far as blogging, reading, and life in general.

How did you do this year with your reading goals? How many books did you read in 2022? Feel free to link me to your posts, so I can check them out!

I am working on my 2023 reading goals post and I’ll be doing a series of posts where I share every single book that I read last year in different posts based off their star ratings. The first post will be all my five star and four star reads of 2022! Those will probably come at the end of the month or in February. This week I am off to Savannah, GA for a few days, so I may not have time to get anything up on my blog this week. Hopefully once I get back and have some time after work, I can catch up with reading your posts too. 🙂

I will end this post with a picture of my cat ColbyJack. He had a rough start to the new year, but he’s finally back to being himself.