Back in January, I shared my goals and ambitions for the annual Goodreads reading goal: 50 books in 12 months and look for second hand copies if possible for a more sustainable reading experience.

After several months in 2020 of suffering a reading block, this year was going to be the point where I would get back on track! With a list on hand, as well as room for any suggestions from friends, booktubers, and even the Goodreads algorithm, I knew where I was to be heading.

2021 was the year that I would expand my personal library, with classics and newer titles in a wide range of subjects and fandoms, for personal enjoyment or dissertation research or even for the intention of doing better in pub quizzes!

The original post laid out several titles in which I was aiming to tackle, and I have barely touched that selection. This is Going to Hurt and The Queen’s Gambit were snapped up and read over the course of a quick weekend, but Circe was put on hold in place of The Song of Achilles. It’s difficult to know exactly where my reading interests will be one, five, twelve months from now – is it going to come around full circle or head down some unknown tangent?

So I try to leave some room for the drop in motivation, reading two or three at a time. I can flick between Geralt’s adventures in The Witcher for a few hours before racing to learn about Kitty Marion in Death in Ten Minutes.

But how is it actually going?

Well, for one, the motivation has remained constant, no significant drops in reading motivation although it has been taking longer than a week sometimes to finish a book. Substituting in several smaller titles, a comic here and there, has helped prop up the number of finished titles, but I’m still a little behind. And unlike last year, I’m not mad about it.

I’m engaging more with the content I’m reading. For the academic or factual titles, such as Invisible Women (which is my current 300-page mountain) I am taking more time to consider the information presented to me and take it in. To learn from it. After all, that’s why we’re reading in the first place, right?

Halfway through the year I should be around 20-25 books into my end goal. I’m lagging just behind on 16 at the time of writing, although if I include the 11 books currently in varying degrees of ‘currently being read’ then I am technically running ahead!

Which then leaves July to December. What comes next?

Besides more reading? More reading!

There’s a lack of classics read this year, especially as I’ve not reread as many as I was expecting (which is a good thing – new books and new stories!), so maybe I will try and read a few more of those. I still need to finish The Prince which has been in progress since January, one page at a time. I’ll get around to The Fall of the House of Usher eventually, if I ever finish Paradise Lost.

But one this is for certain, and it’s that having my own little personal library – and actually using it and seeing that TBR pile shrink – is extremely rewarding. (Now if only I didn’t keep buying books, but that’s a story for another day.)

Image courtesy of Tom Hermans.