Before embarking on a new journey, I think reflecting on past journeys is important. In this case, I’m dedicating some time to reviewing 2014 before I fully delve into 2015. It helps that I set clear goals at the beginning of last year, so I’ll focus on those.
Reviewing Resolutions
Reading
Goal: 2 non-fiction books per month
Assessment: I read a total of 18 non-fiction books last year. That’s an average of 1.5 books. While I was short of 6 books, I definitely read more non-fiction books out of my own volition than in any of the preceding years. I call this one a success.
Goal: 1 German book per month
Assessment: Well, this is embarrassing. The grand total is 2. On the upside, that is 2 more than in 2013, 2012, 2011 and 2010. Looks like I need to be a whole lot more intentional about this in 2015. At least I’m pretty sure I will read the second and third books following Ruby Red by Kerstin Gier because I loved the first book and I want to continue reading them in their original language.
Goal: 1 classic book every 2 months
Assessment: I’m kinda stretching the boundaries as to what books can be counted as classics. Thus I’m counting 2 such books. Again, I should be much more intentional about this. For the coming year I have concrete titles lined up, so I think I will be much more successful this time round.
Goal: 100 books this year
Assessment: I knocked this one out of the park with 132 books. A lot of that has to do with the fact that after graduating from university, I had a lot of free months during which I didn’t work. I doubt I’ll be able to achieve that feat again this year. Work keeps me busy day and night, so I’m actually hard-pressed for time to read nowadays.
Blogging
Goal: Expand my features
Assessment: I experimented a fair bit with features over the past year. I introduced Book Cover Culture and Photography. Both of these features will continue in 2015. I also was fairly diligent with my weekly recaps, Retrospect. Since I don’t have as much time anymore to collate all the interesting posts from the blogosphere, I think I’ll switch things up and only link to the top five posts that catch my attention. For very extensive link-ups to other bloggers and even book-related news, please check out Christina Reads YA and Oh, the Books!
Goal: Be more active on the blogosphere
Assessment: I like to think I was rather sociable over the past year. I did meet a whole lot of new and wonderful people, so this went well. Plus, I’ve plunged into the world of bookstagram. That also opened up channels for me to get to know more people beyond the lovelies I already knew.
Goal: Make sure I keep having fun
Assessment: I still enjoy blogging, so I don’t think I failed to have fun.
Challenges
For a detailed breakdown with all the books that I counted towards each challenge, you can refer to the master page of my 2014 challenges. To summarise though, here’re the numbers:
- 2014 Standalone Reading Challenge — Read 20 out of 15 books
- 2014 Rewind Challenge— My initial goal was 24 books. I reached that very early in 2014, so I upped the goal to 60. I reached 48.
- 2014 Series ChallengeSeries Challenge — Finished/got up to date with 7 out of 6 series.
- 2014 Goodreads Reading Challenge – Read 132 out of 100 books
All in all, I think 2014 was a good year in terms of achieving the goals I set for my challenges. They didn’t add too much pressure because I tried to set realistic targets for myself. Although, by the time July rolled around, I was tired of manually updating my progress. Thank goodness I sorted out the JavaScript issues on my blog, so hopefully most of the challenge updates in 2015 will be automatic.
Happy new year!
Haha, 2014 was my first year that I didn’t read any German books and I like it that way. I hate that I still have a couple of German books on my TBR because I’ll probably never read them (I just can’t read in German anymore, don’t enjoy the language at all).
LOOK AT THOSE CHALLENGES THAT YOU SMASHED! Looks like you had an amazing 2014, Joséphine! We read the same amount of books but like you, I don’t think I’ll ever hit that number again, to be honest. Between uni and work, I don’t think I’ll have much time to myself. I wanted to go for 100 but alas, I settled for 80. And even then that may be overreaching.
Happy new year! I wish you good luck with this year’s goals!
My only reading-related goal last year was to read 115 books for the GR reading challenge, which I accomplished on Christmas eve. I’m going to aim for the same number this year. My main goal this year is to balance my life better. I was so stressed out last year because I couldn’t figure out how to balance school, newspaper, tennis, and blogging.