2020 Reading + Blogging Goals

I can’t believe it’s 2020. Every time I write the date down, I’m in a little disbelief. But here we are! It’s a new year and a new decade!

Every year, I set a goal for 100 books, and I’m continuing my 6×12 challenges (six thematic challenges of twelve books) with the #20in20books and #theunreadshelfproject challenges I’m doing on Instagram! What I want to do more of this year is read what’s actually on my shelf, because I’ve consistently bought books thanks to working at a bookstore, but I keep reading everything else and some of the stuff I have been excited for just languishes. I also want to finish reading series because I am the absolute worst at reading the first book and buying the rest and never finishing it? I don’t know if it’s some weird little anxiety relating to things ending or if it’s because I am also ultimately a lazy reader, but I want to change this.

The thematic challenges for the year are:

  • Science Fiction
  • Penguin Classics
  • NYRB Classics (I keep giving myself this challenge and failing, but 2020 is my YEAR)
  • Books About Books (I miss being in school and reading criticism, so this is my attempt to get back into it)
  • History
  • Middle Grade (Like the YA challenge I gave myself last year because I didn’t read enough, I’m going the Middle Grade route this year)

The twenty titles I picked for #20in20books are:

All the Birds in the Sky – Charlie Jane Anders
Mansfield Park – Jane Austen
The Idiot – Elif Batuman
Enchantress from the Stars – Sylvia Louise Engdahl
An Illusion of Thieves – Cate Glass
The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter – Theodora Goss
Into the Drowning Deep – Mira Grant
The Queens of Innis Lear – Tessa Gratton
The House of Seven Gables – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nooks & Crannies – Jessica Lawson
The Dispossessed – Ursula K. Le Guin
Jade City – Fonda Lee
Ninefox Gambit – Yoon Ha Lee
Middlegame – Seanan McGuire
Torn – Rowena Miller
The Last Painting of Sara de Vos – Dominic Smith
The City Stained Red – Sam Sykes
Creatures of Will & Temper – Molly Tanzer
A Study in Scarlet Women – Sherry Thomas
Deathless – Catherynne M. Valente

I wanted to pick a wide variety of titles, things that I’ve been wanting to read for a while, and things that I know I’ll enjoy reading for various reasons. They’re all fiction, and some of them will work for the various challenges I’ve given myself, too! I will be making separate pages for these challenges this week, so it’s easier for me to track them digitally!

For the blog, I want to revamp the theme, update it now that this one is a couple years old, and really do some in depth information updating, because some of this is so outdated now. I want this to also serve as a functional archive for challenges and whatever else I do, but I need to figure out what I want to add here and how to organize it.

What reading goals have you set for yourself in 2020?