Bookish Goals: 2022 Final Stats and New Goals for 2023

Happy New Year! 2022 was a weird reading year for me. In the good column, I had my best reading month ever, I read a lot of great books, I started reading more adult epic fantasy, and it was the first full year of my blog. In the bad column, I had a month where I read nothing, I read quite a bit less than 2021, and I ended the year a little slumpy. But it’s all over now and the stats are in. Here’s how I did on my 2022 reading goals as well as the goals I have set for 2023.

2022 Goals Review

First, let’s see where I landed on my 2022 goals. For full explanations of the goals, see the post on setting these goals from a year ago.

Goal #1 – Read 100 Books

Goal Met! This one was definitely looking iffy for a while but I picked up some graphic novels in December to close the gap and finished the year reading exactly 100 books. Now, I will say this is 100 according to Goodreads but my CAWPILE spreadsheet says 101 with DNFs and 99 without. I don’t really care to figure out the difference so I’m taking the average and saying I read 100 books even. As you can see from below, it was a wildly uneven year but in the end, it met the goal (with 6 hours and 14 minutes to spare).

Goal #2 – Achieve and Maintain an 80% Feedback Ratio on NetGalley

Goal Met! My current feedback ratio is 92%. I got to 80% and then kept it above and increasing. However, see goal #3.

Goal #3 – Review All ARCs by Publication Date

Goal Not Met. I was doing great with this through September. Then came October, the month I read no books because of some issues with my vision that meant I couldn’t read for a week per doctor’s orders but also put me in a mental space where I didn’t pick up any books for the entire month. I missed 5 ARCs in that time and have read one of them to date, the other 4 remain on my NetGalley shelf. This whole ordeal has me unsure if I’m going to continue on NetGalley as the ARCs were really adding to my stress over reading at that time. For now, I’m not requesting or reading any ARCs and have set no ARC goals for 2023. If I return to NetGalley, I will read these 4 ARCs to clear my shelf before requesting any more.

Goal #4 – Rate Books Consistently

Goal Met! I started using CAWPILE in 2022 and it really has evened out my ratings. I wrote a whole post about my first 6 months of CAWPILE where I concluded this was a good move for me. After writing that, I did write up my own guide on the rankings that I think has helped even more. I do think I want to tweak the ranges for the stars a little for 2023, mostly because I don’t seem capable of giving anything a 10 so 5 stars are nearly impossible. I plan to share my new rankings within the CAWPILE framework once I’ve sorted them out for 2023.

Goal #5 – Read Diverse Genres, Authors, and Topics

Goal Met! This goal was designed to keep me reading books from different authors, in different genres, and about different types of people. There are a few things this year that I tried that were definitely out of my comfort zone. I read some mysteries which was totally new to me because I’m a scaredy cat but I really liked a cozy mystery. I actually read a nonfiction book that cracked my top 5 books of the year (Know My Name). I had a much more diverse split of age ranges, reading more adult books than prior years. Over 60% of the books I read had some kind of LGBTQ+ rep (40% in 2021) and about 25% of the books I read were from BIPOC authors (28% in 2021). So overall, I think I met the spirit of this goal and my reading experience is always better when I’m reading diversely.

One thing that is still very non-diverse about my reading is how many books I read by American women. I don’t know that this is a bad thing but it is always surprising. This year 70% of the books I read were written by a woman and 69% of the books I read were written by American authors. This was 74% and 69% last year, respectively, so really no change. Again, not sure I think this is bad or good so not something I pay attention to.

Goal #6 – Grow Blog

Goal partially met. I really didn’t know how to quantify this goal last year so I said 200 posts and more subscribers than I currently had (72). I currently have 130 subscribers so definitely met that one. I wrote 118 posts in 2022. Like reading in general, blogging took a hit the last 3 months and I’m finally feeling like I’m getting back into it and excited to do it. So hopefully I can be more consistent in 2023.

Goal #7 – Participate in the Bookish Community

Goal sort of met. I don’t want to say I didn’t meet this goal but I definitely didn’t meet it as planned. I didn’t cross post content or anything like that. However, I was much more active in liking and commenting on blogs and in BookTube and made some book friends through Discord for various readathons.

2023 Goals

I’m going to keep my goals pretty simple this year, carrying over some from 2022, adding a couple of new ones and removing a few that I don’t think I need anymore.

Read 100 Books – This is a no-brainer, this will be my 5th year with this goal and hopefully the 4th year that I complete it. 100 books seems to be a good pace for me despite my late-2022 struggles.

23 Books in 2023 – I posted about this already but in order to not fall into the trap of avoiding the big fantasies that scare me but I really do want to read, I put together a list of 23 books/series to read in 2023. The big caveat here is that I want to read 23 books from these series, not necessarily all 23 books on the list. So if I read 4 books from the Realm of the Elderlings, that counts as 4 out of 23, not 1. I already made this little graphic to help me track it each month, I’m really excited to start picking these up. PS – I realize two are not fantasy or even sci-fi but I find them equally big and scary.

Read Diversely – I’m keeping this goal but with a twist. To force me a bit outside of my comfort zone so I hopefully find some new things I love, I’ve decided to use prompts to pick two books I read each month. My sister gave me a set of TBR Cards from Bowties and Books for my birthday in late November. My plan is to draw two cards each month and pick a book for each prompt. A lot of the prompts are about representation or author background or just genres I don’t normally read so I think this will be a fun way to do this. If I absolutely cannot find a book that I want to read for any prompt, I will pick two cards to replace it (capped at 4 per month). I hope this can add some diversity and fun to my monthly reading without adding any unnecessary stress.

200 Blog Entries – I was going to take the number off of this one but for not really blogging for 2 months, I got reasonably close. So I’m determined to do it, we’ll see how it goes. I hope that this will help me actually set aside the time to write the blog ideas that have been floating around my head and also keep me writing reviews even though I’m no longer doing ARCs and those were the bulk of reviews I wrote last year. I’m not setting a goal for followers or anything like that, my blog is more for me than anyone else.

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And that’s it! Four hopefully achievable goals for 2023. What bookish goals have you set? Please let me know in the comments.

Bonnie’s goal for 2023 is to get more treats and continue to evade all attempts at grooming her crazy fur.