Happy New Year, friends! Thank you for sticking around, and welcome if you are new to Down the Book Jar! I started this blog from my love of reading. Is it a raving success? No. Does it make me happy? Most of the time. 😉 I started creating reading goals as I was using Goodreads more. Since then, my goals have evolved and adapted!

Speaking of Goodreads, let’s be friends!

Looking back at 2021.

In 2021, I had two reading goals:

• Read 100 books.
• Read for 20,000 minutes.

I managed to read 103 books for more than 30,000 minutes in 2021, surpassing both of my goals! It was a big achievement for me, and I’m grateful I was able to do it. Be sure to check out the full recap of all of my 2021 books on the blog!

However, I started to feel some severe reading burnout. I was just churning through books, and I wasn’t even processing them sometimes. I went back to series that I had read before that I knew I could read quickly. Now, I have no problem rereading books (that’s why I keep some of them around), but I was reading them because I HAD to. Not because I WANTED to. With that being said, I’m making some changes for my 2022 reading goals.

2022 Reading Goals

This year, I am keeping it simple. My only reading goal for the year is to read 50 books. That’s it. It’s a smaller goal than I’ve had the last few years, but I need to fall in love with reading again.

There is another piece to my reading goals in 2022, but it isn’t quite a goal, per se. I’m going to limit myself to not buying any books this year. I have so many on my shelves that I haven’t read yet! I also have access to NetGalley and a library. Now, this also has some caveats to it.

1. I will still continue my Page One Books subscription. This is a one-time purchase that also supports a small business.
2. I can trade books with others! Whether through book club or on Bookstagram or wherever, trading is okay.
3. Loved ones can gift me books.

Someone asked me “Why don’t you want to buy books?!” It’s not that I don’t WANT to buy books. I do. I have a habit of buying them. It’s that I’m running out of space in my house and on my shelves. Yes, I can clean them out (and probably should), but it’s time for me to be more intentional about what I read.

I also want to get back to reading more new books. Well, new in the sense that I have not read them before. I have a habit, as I mentioned, of going back to series that I love and rereading them in order to reach my goals. I mean, of the 103 books I read in 2021, only 61 of them were new to me. Think of all of the books that I’m missing out on!

You’ll also notice that I’m not tracking the number of minutes that I read this year. That really became a chore. I just want to get back to reading for fun, reading because I love spending time with a book. This blog isn’t going anywhere, but I need to fall back in love with books.

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