2012 Goals and Challenges

It's a new year, which means it's time to start over. For me, it means time to make lists (I love lists!) It's also time to reassess my book-related goals.

First, for my Goodreads challenge, I've decided to up my goal to 125. This past year I had it at 100, and I made it to 115. I feel pretty confident I can reach this goal, especially considering two of my classes this semester are library classes! (side note - I am SO excited for these classes too! Library Materials for Children and Young Adult Literature) I figure a lot of my homework will be reading, so I'll essentially be killing two birds with one stone!

The second challenge I've decided on is the "Dusty Bookshelves" challenge (see button over to the right). I'm hoping to finally get to some of those books that have been sitting on my shelves for so long. I'm not sure how many I am going to commit to. I probably have over 100 unread books on my shelves...but considering how many reviews I've committed too...I'm going to shoot for 2 a month. We'll see how that goes. I thought about how I would decide which ones to read...and I decided to make a list of all my tbr books in a document and then copy it over to random.org and have them randomize my list. Whatever ends up first will be my next read...it kind of makes it fun! It's a surprise every time! I just finished my first book for this challenge (chosen by random) and will be doing a separate review post for it tonight.

I'm also challenging myself to step outside of my normal "reading box." As you can probably already tell, YA is my favorite, especially paranormal and dystopian titles. I am trying to open myself to other genres as well. I've been asked to review some books that fall outside of this genre, and I've decided this would be a good opportunity to challenge myself.

And finally, I am considering picking up a challenge that I started a couple years ago. I had once challenged myself to read ALL of the Newbery winning books (not just medal winning, but also honor winning). There's about 375 on the list currently (dating back to 1922) - and they will be announcing this years later this month. I was doing really well with this challenge (at this point I've read about 85 of them) but I kind of stopped over the summer. I would like to keep up this challenge (especially since I have about 30 Newberys sitting unread on my shelves). I'm going to shoot for one a month, at this point, and we'll see if I can do even better than that.

Whew. I am going to be a busy little reader, aren't I? I am excited about it though! What are some of your goals for this year?