The Terror of Knowing

Confession time: I completely forgot that I had made a 2015 Bookish Resolutions post. I’m not sure exactly when that post – and the resolutions contained therein –  disappeared from my conciousness but, as can be seen from how many I actually completed, I really didn’t stick the plans I set for myself in 2015. Let us briefly review those “best laid plans” …

1. Stay on top of required reading – ACHIEVED (I graduated MA with Distinction this year so I must have done something right!)
2. Write TBRs that are actually manageable, realistic, and appealing. – SEMI-ACHIEVED (only since I stopped writing official TBRs altogether)
3. Write a review, even just a sentence or two, no matter how incoherent/flaily, for every single book/play/poem I read this year. – SEMI-ACHIEVED (I wrote a lot more reviews that I had previously but not for every single book)
4. Give everything I read some kind of rating. – ACHIEVED (It was a fairly simple goal though!)
5. Make blog posts/videos more regularly. – ACHIEVED (I’m certainly blogging more than I used to)
6. Have more structure to the blog posts/videos. – SEMI-ACHIEVED (I have started to participate more in readathons and weekly memes such as Top 5 Wednesday and Friday Reads. I still like to make more thoughtful discussion-based posts, however.)
7. Be more mindful of what I am reading, using Book Riot and Reading Challenge for guidance – SEMI-ACHIEVED (42/50 on the Popsugar Reading Challenge and 15/24 on Book Riot’s Read Harder Challenge)

As for the extra text-specific goals I set myself? I failed… every single one of them. I hoped to right many a wrong by reading in their entirety (rather than piecemeal sections to pass a class) Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Hugo’s Les Misérables, and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Likewise I hoped to tackle as many Dickens’ novels as is possible. I did not do that. I had to read A Christmas Carol and Oliver Twist for a Victorian Literature and Other Media class I took in Lent term but I don’t think I should count those since I had to complete them.

So I think we can all agree 2015’s Bookish Resolutions was a mixed bag of success and failure. However, because I never learn, I’ve decided to jump on this bandwagon once again and set myself some (hopefully) manageable reading goals for 2016. I’ve stopped making life resolutions because I never ever stick to them, so with those I might as well not bother – the reading ones, however, are sometimes accidentally achieved, so with that cynical mindset onwards to 2016…

1. Read 52 books this year – it only works out as 1 per week so not too difficult
2. Read at least 1 non-fiction book a month – I don’t read enough non-fiction but I’ve found a liking for it recently
3. Get caught up with more series / finish series – this might be difficult to achieve with the likes of A Song of Ice and Fire but god loves a trier, right?
4. Write a review for every single book I read – no matter how long or short, profound or ridiculous, the review is, I must write one for every book
5. Keep a book journal – this should help enormously with resolution #4
6. Read at least 4 of my longer “project books” – high contenders include Anna Karenina, Moby Dick, War and Peace, Les Misérables, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Goldfinch, and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell 
7. Write more thoughtful blog posts – the weekly memes are nice and all and certainly useful jumping-off points if I need to hammer out a quick post late on a Friday night when I’m tired, but I can fall into the trap of mindlessly fulfilling the bare minimum of posts and I’d like to be more creative and thoughtful about posts and reviews this year, even if that means taking my time over them

I shall leave it at seven since that seems a nice magical number. I’m aware a lot of these are vague and difficult to measure but the book-specific resolutions really don’t seem to work for me so hopefully I’ll be more likely to actually keep these ones in mind as I’m choosing what to read in 2016.

How about you – have you set some 2016 bookish resolutions, what are they? How did your 2015 resolutions fare? Do you think resolutions are a waste of time since no one (read: I) reviews them until December when they realise they’ve accomplished none of them? Comment below!