Goals are funny things. When it comes to bookish goals, I’ve never reached them all. For the past 3 years, I’ve set a goal of reading 100 books but I’ve only done so once. For 2022 I pondered the idea of not setting any goals and instead simply seeing what happens.
After some thought though I decided that goals, whether or not they are fully reached, are helpful. They remind me of the habits I want to form, of how I want to spend my time. Numbers can be helpful in order to keep me pushing forward. So here are my reading goals for 2022:
- Read 80 books. A smaller number than previous goals but more than my actual number in 2021.
- Review 70 of those books. That’s ambitious, given my track record, but it’s chosen in order to self-motivate!
- Read at least 10 translated works. Not a huge number but a jump from actual numbers. I’ve also set the nebulous goal of reading “more” translated books but I think a hard and fast number might help.
- Complete A Virtuous Book Challenge. I have 7 more titles to go and 3 are essentially short stories so this shouldn’t be too difficult.
- Read 20 books I already own. This was a goal I failed at miserably last year but again I’m hoping a solid number will help.
- Read 20 books that have been on my TBR since before 2020. My TBR as it exists now has books that have been on it since 2013. Many of those are books I already own so I hope this goal and the previous one will co-exist nicely.
- Read the entire Bible. A goal I completed in 2021 and am excited to do again. This year I purchased a daily devotional by Nancy Guthrie called The One Year Praying Through the Bible for Your Kids. It has a Bible reading plan for each day as well as a short devotional and then a prayer focused on parenting and raising children. I couldn’t have known at the beginning of 2021 the spiritual road that God would lead our family down but I benefitted hugely from spending time daily in scripture and reading the Bible as a whole and I’m looking forward to seeing how God uses it all this year.
Do you set reading goals? Do you stick to them or are they more like suggestions?
Karissa Reads Books 
Best of luck with all of these! I hope you have a great reading year 📚😊
Thank you!!
Good luck, Karissa.
Sometimes I think I should set a goal to read more of the books I own.
I’m pretty bad about letting them pile up so even though I do read them it never makes a significant dent. I’m hoping a solid number to aim for might help!
Your comment reminds me of a saying about how failing to plan, means planning to fail. I’m guessing that you might be successful in bringing down these numbers and I probably won’t be!
I don’t set a goal of reading a certain number of books each year because that discourages me from reading longer books. I’m devoted to a calendar that tells me how to spend each hour (I get lost without a direction like this), so I’ll have one hour that says “Read book for Grab the Lapels.” My aim is 75 pages per day, depending on the type of book (it doesn’t work with short stories or poems).
Another thing that helps me is remembering there are 52 weeks in a year. If someone has a goal of 100 books, would they be able to read 2 books per week? Would they review all of them? etc.
I find it so fascinating how different people work and what works for them. I can see how organized you are in your regular posts and you always seem to know what you’re going to read and review next.
I partially chose 80 books for the year because I thought about how many books I read in a month and what worked for me there so it feels like a more manageable goal.
In terms of my reading, I don’t have true goals but rather a few priorities! I’ll also have to check out this devotional you mentioned!!!
The devotional is great so far. I like that it combines the devo with the read the Bible in a year plan. A friend is also reading it this year so we’re going to chat about it as we go and make a point of praying for each other.
I think setting goals is a good idea too – if it’s important to us, setting a goal typically reflects that. But of course this is for fun, so not getting upset or discouraged if you don’t reach that goal is also key! I’ve only set one goal in my year-end summary, and it’s something I’m pretty devoted to doing.
I’m with you that goals are good for keeping me focused on what I’d like to read and that the actual achievement of them doesn’t matter so much. And I’m definitely in agreement about having a goal to read some of those older books that linger accusingly on the shelf! Hope you enjoy your reading and we’ll compare our failures – I mean, successes! – at the end of the year… 😉