Bookending Winter – Reflection Time

Wahey there! My first Bookending Winter post! This looks like a good one. I do like discussing books and goals and just THINGS surrounding books, okay?! This is a book blog after all and not like a gaming blog [though something is coming up soon which I’ll talk about in a recent post).

Laurie @ Laurie’s Bookshelf

Monday 2nd December

Reflection time

Prompt Explanation: December is here and that means it’s time to look back on the past year. How was your 2019 regarding books? Did you haul too many books? Did you have a great reading year? Too many (E)ARCs left? And did you pass your reading challenge? Furthermore, it’s time to look forward. What goals would you like to reach in the last month of 2019? Certain books you want to read before 2020 is upon us? Do you have reading goals for 2020? So, let’s reflect on your bookish 2019!

This is a good prompt! I’ve uhh been lacking in my bujo spreads (I’ll try to do one for this month) but I do like these types of things – talking about your stats re books.

My Year in Books:

I had a great year regarding reading books. You know, other than the little, tiny moment where I just went off and downloaded like 8 or something arcs when I should’ve been finishing my older books. But you know, I did it, yes, and then I bolted down and started to review these books! And I’ll continue to do it!

I did haul a lot of books, hahaha. But I’m happy to say that my arc tbr is slowly being taken down and I think I might be kind to myself and allow myself to download/request an arc. On Edelweiss soon, as I only have 15 arcs that need to be reviewed (listen, I’m all about transparency and honesty here), so I’ll start there once I’m nearer to 10 arcs. Netgalley is still a long shot. I’d like to reach at least 25 arcs (currently 36!) before requesting/downloading something on there. Both I think is doable.

Goodreads Goal

So, last year I made my Goodreads goal 100 books and failed. By a lot. Which, yes, I know that just because I failed to read 100 books doesn’t mean I’m not a reader – but I like winning things! This year I bumped the goal down to 50 and have actually read 53 books so far! Most of them have been library reads, as I’ve been fortunate to be able to read a lot of books (especially new ones!) from the library, which definitely pushed my numbers up!

Rest of Year?

For the rest of the year, well, I’ll be doing Bookending Winter and hopefully posting a few other things – reviews, maybe even a tag, in between so you definitely won’t get rid of me haha. I think I might plan to get cracking on the reviews, so hopefully December will be a full month re posts.

Next Year!

As for next year, you beaut. I’ll bump up my Goodreads reading challenge to 75! I thought 100 but let’s see how we do with 75 before we try the big boy on. And then probably just more and more posting of reviews and everything! Which I’m excited about since I like writing them (even though they give me grief because I sit there and I’m like…what to write, what to write).

Next Year’s Goals

I’m hopefully wanting to actually start posting Booktube posts! My channel’s all up and I even subscribed to a couple of people, it’s just that I’ve only filmed one video and haven’t edited it yet – which is hard! I’m only able to edit on the phone so that’s taking longer and I obviously have to figure out how to edit and what to edit out – but it’s all about learning!

I might start reaching out to authors whose books I really liked for an interview of a sort (which can probably be a bit nerve-wrecking but I can be strong!!). I would very much like to start requesting physical arcs from publishers, but I’m in Australia until the end of January, go back to South Africa and then back to Australia in June until, well, I’m not sure. So that might be a problem for physical arcs as far as I’m aware of.

But we’ll see what happens! I think I might also start to branch out a bit more – maybe post reviews of movies or series I loved so much they deserve their own post (I’m looking at you two series I loved so much I need to write posts about and just haven’t yet). And I might also review text role-playing games as I love them so much!! Also, do comics from Tapa and Webtoon and such count? I might have them as a feature…

That’s everything I can think of! How did your bookish 2019 go? Good, bad, or mediocreeeeeeeee (high-five to you if you get the reference!) Chat to me down in the comments!