Am I on Track To Meet My Goals This Year? A Midyear Look at My Goals

I do not have a blog post from the beginning of this year that discusses my goals I have for 2020. I have a reading bullet journal (and another for tracking my to do lists) and my reading spreadsheet that tracks my statistics for the year. Using both of these, I am going to check in on some of the goals with you to see how my progress is going. Before doing that, if you are curious about my answers for the Midyear Freak Out Book tag, I did answer that as well. It gives you more direct book feedback if you want to check that out. 

GoodReads Goal: 100 Books

The first goal I always set is my GoodReads goal. After serving multiple years on award committees (I am very blessed and fortunate to be able to do them), I need a bit of a decompressing year after reading so many books the year before. Last year I had the pleasure to serve on Best Fiction for Young Adults (here is our list) a committee through YALSA, and it is a heavy reading load committee. Because of this, I set my GoodReads simply at 100 books, knowing I need to give myself permission to take it a bit easier. I know for some that 100 books still seems like a lot of books, but for me it is pretty low since it is just averaging two books a week.

Current check in: 70 Books (19 books ahead of schedule)

It is interesting because with the pandemic, I have had good reading months but I have been battling more slumps this year then will struggle to want to read more than a few pages a day. This goes into another goal of mine this year.

Goal 1: Read everyday--even if it is only a few pages or a bit of an audiobook

Thus far, I have made that goal. I admit there are times when I have not read much more than a few pages because I want to be able to say I read every day this year. On my spreadsheet, my average count is 173 pages per day. Not too shabby! My current page count thus far is 26,196. My current listening time is 6 days, 5 hours and 49 minutes.  

Goal 2: Read 12 classics this year

I am at 5 classics for the year thus far. I am slightly behind on this goal as I should have 6 completed at this point. I have read:

   

Each of these books above I listened to as I find I am enjoying experience the classics through audiobooks this year. I really recommend if you struggle with classics but want to give them a shot, to try listening to it as an audiobook. It can bring the often times dense language to a more approachable level.

Goal 3: To read across multiple genres, age groups, format, and form instead of sticking to my comfort areas. 

I have read across 14 different types of books this year, including fiction and nonfiction.  This does not include across the different intended audiences, but genres overall. Here is my current chart:

And because the writing is a bit small, here they are broken into Fiction and Nonfiction categories:

Fiction	Nonfiction
General Paranormal Science Fiction Fantasy Romance Realistic Historical Mystery/Crime Classics	General Memoir/Bio Nature/Science Business/Self Help True Crime

I still want to read a horror book which is completely out of my comfort zone, but I do plan on reading Sawkill Girls by Claire LeGrand. I also have several current events/politics and some foodie style books to read which would add a couple more to my nonfiction variety. 

For my age groups, I have read all three of the age groups I track: Adult, Young Adult, and Middle Grade.  

I am a bit surprise that the Adult age group is so far ahead of Young Adult. I think this is contributing to my reader guilty (blog post coming about it) because I do not feel I have read enough books to really promote to my students. Because I work with middle school and high school students, I really need to up my Middle Grade and Young Adult books. While I do think it is possible to be a librarian without reading the books your students (or patrons) read because of review journals, blogs, and vlogs, I do believe I cannot be the strongest librarian I want to be by not reading in those age groups.

Here are my charts showing my Format and Form breakdowns:

  

For my format, I am surprisingly reading more physical, print books this year. I thought I would be a bit higher on my digital format, but I really am working to read my backlist--that is another goal I have this. More on this in a bit. 

One of the other things I am tracking for the first time is the form my books are. Not surprisingly, I vastly read more prose format books then any other style.  I do have more comics, essay collections, and poetry (novels-in-verse in particular).

Goal 4: Do a better job of reading my Own TBR

I admit I do have a fairly substantial book collection (I am a librarian after all), but I have a habit of picking up books and not reading them. I also subscribe to MyBookBox and Book of the Month subscription services. I have books I get from publishers I need to finish up reading too. I am trying to be more conscious of the amount of books I am reading versus reading my owned books. 

I am doing much better than I have in the past with reading my Own TBR and I have also been reading my Library books as well. I do want to work on getting that percentage higher, but as long as it is the primary percentage by the end of the year, I think that is a win in my book. As a secondary goal, I am sitting at 32 books read from my shelves, I would like to get this to at least 50 books before the end of 2020.

The above are the goals I had at the start of this year. I do not think I could end this post without addressing the need to continue to read diversely. I am trying very hard to increase the amount of diverse books I am reading--both fiction and nonfiction--each month and to seek out marginalized voices so I am reading more #OwnVoices. It is too important that we do better with buying and advocating for books from marginalized voices. 

For transparency, here is where my #OwnVoices is at this point in the year:

My goal is to get that percentage higher--almost 16% is not good enough. I can do better.

So there you have it my goals check in. I have other posts planned including the future of this blog, book lists, posts discussing my career as a school librarian and so much more. I hope you are having as good of year as possible. Please let me know if you have done a blog post or video updating your goals. I personally love goals and monitoring them as it gives me an update on how I am doing.