Did I Complete My 2021 Reading Goals?

Hi everyone! Let’s just call 2021 the year where I didn’t meet ANY of my goals, shall we? I’m not really sure what happened with my reading and blogging throughout 2021, but both just really suffered. I could blame it on another year of COVID, but I don’t really think that’s it I just think I lost some of my motivation and was more focused on other hobbies. Today I’ll be reacting to my 5 reading goals for 2021.

Goal #1: Read Diversely

In my 2021 reading goals post, I said that I wanted to try to get to at least 50% of my read books to be from non-white and/or LGBTQ+ authors. I also pointed out that as far as a statistic goes, it could potentially be pretty tough to determine if a book I read meets that criteria because authors don’t always disclose that sort of information publicly, so I would be tracking it using ‘yes/no/unsure’ categories.

My breakdown of the 48, is 15 ‘Yes’, 20 ‘No’, and 13 ‘Unsure’. That puts me at about 30% that I’m sure fit into that category, and about 27% that I’m not sure about but could count, which is about 50% so not too bad for this goal!

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Goal #2: Read my 20 for 2021 list and reach my Goodreads goal

I don’t even need to look at my 20 for 2021 list to tell you that I didn’t read the majority of the books on it because I chose a bunch of backlist titles when as a reviewer/blogger, people want to see more about the newest books so those tend to be the ones I focus on. And like I mentioned earlier, I’ve just been really off my game for my reading in general so I definitely did not hit my goal of 65 books, in fact, I didn’t even reach 50 books this year!

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Goal #3: Clean up my bookshelves with an unhaul

I definitely accomplished this at the beginning of 2021 because we ended up doing some upgrades to my apartment including painting, new flooring, and new furniture, which also meant a LOT of cleaning and organizing. All the books that I had in stacks around my apartment ready to be donated FINALLY found new homes, but I’m definitely due for another unhaul soon since it’s kind of getting out of hand again.

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Goal #4: Read an average of 50 pages a day

In my goals post for this goal I said that I knew I wouldn’t be able to actually read 50 pages a day, but I could maybe average it all out to come out to 50 pages a day. There are a few different ways I could look at this, so as of the day I’m writing this post, I’ve read a total of 20,136 pages for my finished books. That means books I added to my spreadsheet that I’ve fully completed. Now if I go to my StoryGraph, it says that I read a total of 22,516 pages because StoryGraph also includes any books that you’ve marked as currently reading and updated how far you got into the book. So that means I’ve read 2,380 pages of books that I did NOT finish this year, which is INSANE. However, 20,136 comes out to an average of 55 pages a day, and 22,516 is an average of 62 pages a day so I definitely met this goal either way!

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Goal #5: Interact more with other bloggers

Again, because of my lack of motivation I ended up not completing this goal because my blog just wasn’t my priority. Lots of work for little reward and all. I still stand by my assessment in my goals post that I still don’t feel like I’ve found my place or my people yet and there aren’t really many people that I interact with often enough to really get to know them, which is what I wanted when I started this entire blog journey! I also just struggle in general with making friends, so it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that it still hasn’t happened.

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How did you do on your 2021 goals? I’ll be posting my 2022 goals soon, so keep an eye out for that post!