2022 Reading & Reading Challenge Goals

I feel so late in the game to posting this, since I’ve already started reading toward my new challenges. I kept delaying “officially” picking my goals because I had several prompts that I was having a hard time filling in, and I wanted to make sure I had most of my list set before I even tried to formulate my goals. That’s not to say that the lists still can’t change since I’m sure they will, but it’s much easier for me to get organized when I have at least a tentative idea of what I’ll be reading. Like last year, I ended up making a lot of last-minute changes to my list just today so it’s left me feeling a bit disorganized even though I’m actually much further ahead now in making sure I’ve actually plugged in all of my highest priority books! For some reason, I tend to get caught up a lot about whether a book “feels right” for a prompt, even if it technically fits. It’s also been a bit of a weird feeling to plan for these challenges at all because it never really felt like the year ended. Somehow I usually feel like there’s a bit more of a distinction between the end of one year’s challenges and the start of the next, but that was definitely not the case this year.

This year, I’ve decided to organize my challenges again as a 2-year process. I have way too many books that I want to read and challenges that I want to do, which leaves me with a huge number of books overall. I think I got a much better sense of the logistics behind this kind of structure last year, although I would definitely love to be a bit more on top of prioritizing some of the books I’m most excited for. I’ve taken on a total of 7 challenges this year again, with a huge total of 472 books if I were to read everything in one year. However, as I’ll explain in a bit more detail below, I have some ideas of how to set things up to divide them over the two years. This is easily my highest overall total number of books ever, and although I know there is realistically no way I’ll get anywhere close, I’m curious to see how many I can read! Even though this is not a Top 10 Tuesday post this year, I still stuck to the structure of giving myself 10 goals. I’ve actually ended up sticking to many of the same goals as in previous years, but with a few modifications.

1) Finish all challenges by the deadlines that I set

Since it’s unrealistic to finish all of these challenges within the year, I decided to pick two to prioritize finishing completely. Another two have a minimum number I’d like to hit, and for the remaining three I will just read as much as I can. Ideally, I’d love to at least pass the 50% mark on every challenge by the end of 2022.

• Goodreads Around the Year (52 books plus 1 extra wild card, so 53 books total) – finish by December 31, 2022
• PopSugar (50 books + 6 extra books for one prompt that was split, so 56 books total) – finish by December 31, 2022
• ATY Top Picks & Leftovers (40 of the prompts I voted for that did not make the final list, and 50 prompts that I am carrying forward from last year, so 90 in total) – finish by end of 2023, but ideally at least half finished by the end of 2022
• 52 Book Club (52 books) – finish by end of 2023
• Flourish & Blotts: OWLS (12 sets of 5 prompts each, inspired by subjects from Harry Potter so 60 books total) – get a “passing grade” in each subject by the end of 2022, which means minimum of 3 out of 5 books for that subject
• Booklist Queen (52 books) – finish by end of 2023
• Pick Your Poison 2021 (26 groups of 4 books each plus 5 wildcards, so109 books) – I’m a year behind on this one because the challenge is not posted until very late in the year. I’m intending to finish at least 2 books in each set of 4 by the end of 2022

Out of curiosity, I calculated how many books I would need to finish per month to complete the entire total of 472, and it was 39 books every single month! Even with my modified goals, I would still need to read 24 book per month to finish everything. I tend to read an average of 13-15 every month, so that would be a pretty big jump. At least some of these prompts involve graphic novels, children’s books, or audiobooks so that should up my numbers at least a bit.

2) Read 200 books

I think I would ideally love to reach 220 books, but considering I haven’t even come that close to 200 in a couple of years, I decided to stick with that as my goal first. As mentioned above, my plans include a decent number of graphic novels, audiobooks and even a few children’s books, so I think I’m pretty likely to have a higher total overall. Of course, it’s impossible to know how this year will go given the still on-going pandemic, but hopefully I can finally reach 200!

3) Read some more series and duologies

For the past few years, I’ve always set myself a goal of trying to finish off some of the series that I’d been meaning to read for a long time, or newer series that I was excited to try. I realized pretty quickly this year that I had a very long list of series and especially duologies that I wanted to read, but it’s a little hard to say what a realistic number will be since some may be subject to publishing delays.

The series that I meant to pick up in 2021 and didn’t get to, which have now become my highest priority to finish are:

• An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir (4 books)
• Caraval by Stephanie Garber (3 books)
• Aurora Rising by Jay Kristoff and Amie Kauffman (3 books)
• The Simon Snow series by Rainbow Rowell (2 books remaining)

I also have some series that are already completely published that I would like to prioritize:

• The Guinevere Deception by Kiersten White (3 books)
• A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson (3 books)
• The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion (rereads, 3 books)
• You by Caroline Kepnes (3 books, 2 of which are rereads)
• The Lady Janies by Cynthia Hand, Brody Ashton and Jodi Meadows (3 books)
• Modern Love by Alisha Rai (3 books)
• Lumberjanes (11 books remaining)

Plus, there are some series that are not completely published, but I would like to catch up on them, especially since many are series that I’ve been looking forward to reading for years but kept putting off because I was waiting for the remaining books:

• Infinity Cycle by Adam Silvera (2 books currently available)
• Scholomance by Naomi Novik (2 books currently available)
• Legacy of Orisha by Tomi Adeyemi (2 books currently available)
• Kingdom of the Wicked by Kerri Maniscalco (2 books currently available, possibly a third this year)
• The Beautiful by Renee Ahdieh (3 books currently available)
• The Gilded Ones by Namina Forna (2 books currently available)
• The Infinity Courts by Akemi Dawn Bowman (2 books currently available)

In addition to all of those, and largely because I wasn’t sure how many series would actually be available, I also decided to prioritize a ton of duologies. It’s possible that some of these will end up becoming longer series, but as of now I think they are duologies:

• Monsters of Verity by Victoria Schwab (reread)
• These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong
• Gilded by Marissa Meyer
• Sands of Arawiya by Hafsah Faizal
• The Blood of Stars by Elizabeth Lim
• A Song of Wraiths and Ruins by Roseanne A. Brown
• Legendborn by Tracy Deonn
• This Poison Heart by Kalynn Bayron
• Blood Like Magic by Liselle Sambury
• Wings of Ebony by J. Elle
• Six Crimson Cranes by Elizabeth Lim
• Fable by Adrienne Young
• Enchantee by Gita Trelease
• The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert
• All the Stars and Teeth by Adalyn Grace
• Sea Witch by Sarah Henning
• Skyhunter by Marie Lu

All of those series and duologies together make a very overwhelming total of 35! In terms of structuring it as a goal, I think I will break it down this way:

• All 4 leftover series finished by the end of the year
• At least 5 of the completed series by the end of the year
• At least 3 of the unfinished series by the end of the year (and possibly prioritize any that do get a final book published, if possible)
• At least half (8) of the duologies, which leaves some room for any that do not get their second book on time this year to be pushed back safely

4) Read at least one book by each of my top priority authors to try

This has become one of my favourite goals to try every year, and it’s such a great push to finally pick up some of the authors that I’ve been meaning to read for a long time. I always set my goal as a minimum of one book for each of these authors. I’m thinking for this year I’d love to have a bit of a reach goal of 2 books per author, but I’m not sure how realistic that is (especially after seeing that massive list of series!). As usual, I’ve divided it up between YA authors and non-YA authors.

YA Authors to Read in 2022
Stacey Lee
June Hur
Bethany C. Morrow
Adiba Jaigirdar
Eric Smith
Margaret Rogerson
Emery Lee
Kosoko Jackson
Kristina Forest
Aminah Mae Safi
Erica Waters

Non-YA Authors to Read in 2022
Wendy Walker
J.T. Ellison
Jennifer McMahon
Robyn Harding
Tarryn Fisher
Lucy Foley
Grady Hendrix
Alex Finlay
Jennifer Hillier
Rachel Hawkins
Silva Moreno-Garcia

5) Prioritize my reading better!

This goal has become such a source of frustration the past few years! It’s most likely because I’m just taking on so many challenges at once, but I keep falling behind on reading the books that I actually really want to read or finishing my top priority challenges. I’m going to try again this year to set myself a loose structure of reading an average of 3-4 books per month for each of my main challenges (ATY and PopSugar). It’s a very realistic total, if I actively pay attention to which books I’m picking at the time. I’m a huge mood reader so I end up reading what I feel like without really paying attention to which challenge they belong to, but I think even a tiny bit more attention to this would really help me prioritize better. In general, I think I need to either memorize my priority book lists better or at least check back more frequently to see what I’d been most excited to pick up. I really want to finally get back to finishing off some of my challenges within the year!

6) Read some more non-fiction

As I mentioned in my goals wrap-up yesterday, non-fiction is really not a genre that I gravitate toward at all. I’ve tried several different topics, styles, subgenres, etc. and it’s still very rare for me to find one that I actively enjoy or find motivating to read. I tend to find audiobooks and graphic memoirs are my best bets for reading non-fiction. Last year, I’d set myself a goal of reading 8-10 non-fiction books through the year, largely because I had around that many as challenge prompts and knew that I wouldn’t be that motivated to pick them up unless I had a goal attached. This year, I have quite a few non-fiction prompts again and wanted to push myself a bit to read 15 non-fiction. I’m still very likely to rely on audiobooks to achieve this, but it doesn’t matter since that’s still reading!

7) Read more thrillers!

This always feels like a bit of a silly goal since thrillers are one of my favourite genres, but I keep adding a ton of them to my plans for the year, and then getting surprised when I don’t feel like I’ve read that many by the end of the year. I think this year it will help to have that extra push because my plans (mostly due to the series) are quite fantasy-heavy, and I want to balance things out a bit. The past two years, I’ve managed to read about 30 thrillers each year. This year, I’d love to exceed that number! I don’t necessarily have a specific goal in mind of exactly how many I want to read, so I’d say that if I read anything more than 30, I’ll count it as a goal accomplished. For context, roughly a quarter of the books I have earmarked for prompts in my challenges overall (a little over 100 in total) are thrillers, so it would be great to prioritize more of them.

8) Read more historical fiction and more contemporary romance

I picked these two genres specifically because they are both genres that I generally enjoy, but I don’t necessarily read as often. I even had quite a few contemporary romances in my challenge plans for 2021 and somehow didn’t get to the majority of them! I don’t even think there was any specific reason why I didn’t, but I just kept putting them aside for other books instead. I didn’t have very many historical fiction on my list for the past few years because I found it was a genre that I was rarely in the mood for, but I want to push myself a bit to get back into it since I’ve generally really liked it before! Based on the challenge prompts I have this year, I’ve decided that my goal will be to read at least 10 historical fiction books (YA or adult, doesn’t matter), and 15-20 adult contemporary romances. I purposely don’t want to include YA romance in there because I think it will get a little confusing when most YA books involve some kind of romance plotline.

9) Read my Top 22 to Read in 2022

This list is the main reason I’d been holding back posting my goals, because I wanted to get more of my challenge plans filled in before I picked my books. I have yet to ever complete this goal in its entirety, but aside from last year, I usually come pretty close! I tend to choose these books because they are the ones that I keep coming back to while planning and that I’m determined to fit into my challenges somewhere. It’s also a list that I have to balance a bit with my 5-star predictions because there can be some overlap. I really want to make an extra effort to read them all this year! It was pretty embarrassing to get barely halfway through my list in 2021, even though literally no one else cares but me. These are the 22 books I’ve chosen to prioritize for 2022:

• An Arrow to the Moon by Emily X.R. Pan
• In Every Generation by Kendare Blake
• When You Get the Chance by Emma Lord
• 56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard
• Kill All Your Darlings by David Bell
• Insomnia by Sarah Pinborough
• Nine Lives by Peter Swanson
• The Golden Couple by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen
• Rock, Paper, Scissors by Alice Feeney
• In a Garden Burning Gold by Rory Power
• A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee
• Seasonal Fears by Seanan McGuire
• Hide by Kiersten White
• The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune
• All My Rage by Sabaa Tahir
• Empire of the Vampire by Jay Kristoff
• The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood
• The Push by Ashley Audrain
• Cherish Farrah by Bethany C. Morrow
• See You Yesterday by Rachel Lynn Solomon
• Ace of Spades by Faridah Abike-Iyimide
• Behind the Red Door by Megan Collins

10) Enjoy what I’m reading!

This will always be my last goal of any year! It is very important to me that I actually enjoy the books I read and avoid burning myself out on the whole process, which is definitely a risk with so many books I want to prioritize. Each year, I seem to be getting better and better and picking books that I’m confident I’ll enjoy so even if I don’t end up reading quite as many books in total as I plan, at least I usually end up loving the majority of them. I’m especially excited for a lot of the books that are coming out in 2022 and I can’t wait to read so many of them! So far, I still have yet to rate anything in one of my reading challenges below 3 stars, so I’m hoping to keep that streak going again.

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