#and before anyone gets mad because i know 'quality vs quantity' is an age-old debate in the reading community: this post is about ME

[wildereader]

2024 reading goals

For the past few years, I've been very into the goodreads/storygraph reading challenges, where I decide how many books and pages I want to read over the course of the year and then race myself to the finish line.

I had fun the first few times I did it, especially since it was how I got myself back into reading - throughout most of high school and college, I stopped reading a lot for fun because of the pressures of school and extracurriculars.

However, 2023 was the year that I really went hard with my reading. By the end of last night - New Year's Eve - I had read a whopping 149 books in one year.

Granted, a very good percentage of those were volumes 12-52 of One Piece - I watched the live action with a friend who loves the series, and I had so much fun watching it that I needed to continue the story immediately. 40 volumes is a lot of reading for sure, but since manga doesn't take me long to read, it didn't feel like a lot until I saw how it absolutely swept all of my stats!

I was also unemployed for the first half of 2023, so I had all the time in the world at that point in between job searching and applying (and crying and questioning everything) to read. Those months were hard for a lot of reasons, but I am grateful and I know I'm lucky to have had so much time to do something I love.

But if 2023 was my year of quantity when it came to my reading, 2024 is going to be my year of quality.

And I don't just mean the quality of the books I read - I would say almost everything I read in 2023 was of good quality. I mostly mean quality time with the books. I don't just want to speed through a book because I've arbitrarily decided I need to finish it in a certain number of days, or I need to read a certain number of books by the end of a month, or I need to outdo my 2023 self... absolutely not. I want to rediscover my passion for reading. I want to find new favorites, or spend time reading old ones and falling in love with them all over again. I want to read with intention, I want to think about the books I read, I want to be able to give good critique and analysis and in-depth thoughts on them.

And for me, I know that doing all that to the best of my ability means that I will need to spend time with them.

So often, I get overwhelmed at the amount of books I want to read, the amount of books that are coming out in a year, the amount of books I've never heard of but I will surely find interesting, if only I did know about them. I guess you could think of it as a kind of FOMO for books. That's definitely the driving force for me behind my desire to get through as many books as quickly as I can - because there are still so many that I want to read next! So many that I own, so many that my friends recommend, so many that I see talked about online, so many I see on the shelves at the library that I can just take home and dive into for free!

But I cannot keep up the pace at which I was reading in 2023. As I got further into the year, as I racked up more and more books on my Goodreads, as the serotonin neurons were firing in my brain at watching the colorful Storygraph graphs morph and grow over the year... I found my joy for reading slowly siphoning away. As I read more than I ever had in the course of a year, I just felt more and more indifferent toward everything I was reading. I was too focused on my plans for what to read next, I wasn't paying attention to what I was reading in the moment (sorry for the kitschiness of the sentiment). It's definitely some kind of burnout - and I love reading too much to allow it to progress any further.

I certainly have books that I'm aiming to read this year - probably a couple dozen at least. But I'm not going to push myself to read them all. I'll be more forgiving with myself for taking a long time to read a book. It will take time to break these reading habits I've gotten myself into, but I know it will be worth it. I know I'll thank myself in the long run.

#and before anyone gets mad because i know 'quality vs quantity' is an age-old debate in the reading community: this post is about ME #and MY reading experiences #if you can read dozens and dozens of books in a year and have quality experiences with each of them that is so fantastic! #i am genuinely jealous of you! #i however know my limits now and cannot. #mckay speaks #bookblr #booklr #reading goals #reading journal #bookworm #book lover #bibliophile #bookish #book blog #readers of tumblr