I feel like every month I tell you I’m going to read less books. But I’ve fallen off the bandwagon. This year started out okay, but then closer to the end of January I looked at February and March and my fear of falling behind drove me into a frenzy. My goal in 2020 is to take better care of myself, and it means I read less. This month was a difficult way to enter 2020.
Resolutions?
I had more work than ever and I got to say, February isn’t going any better so far. I don’t know, at this point, what can help. Maybe by making myself read one backlist book between the ARCs to kind of help myself reduce anxiety about those? I’ve been reading romance books before bed to get the ‘joy’ of reading back into these for fun books. That’s definitely helped a bit, but it doesn’t help the actual number of books I read.
So maybe less focus on the amount of books, and instead on the quality and pressure I feel to read? Who even knows at this point. I know 2020 is supposed to start off optimistically, but January has brought a lot of thoughts about book blogging, my work load in general, and how I measure my personal success. So pretty small topics right?
Books Read
Did you see that non-fiction book, Minor Feelings? It’s like the first non-fiction book I’ve read in SO long. I can’t actually remember the last non-fiction book I read. I wasn’t even planning on it, so in my reading tracker I didn’t even have a field for non-fiction. I was also able to read a few of my most anticipated books and Asian (American) releases!
In general I also read quite a few adult SFF/fiction books: 4 and a ton of romance books, 6, as you can see. I can’t believe I also forgot I was reading The Wicked and the Wallflower. I can’t even keep up with my kindle sometimes as it pulls from Netgalley and Edelweiss.
Last year I showed you where I got the books, are you interested in that in 2020? I could also outline the five star reads only? If you were super sneaky, you’d see that in my thumbnail for these wrap ups I only put the 5 star reads in!
Statistics
This year I want to be better about figuring out, and analyzing my reading. So here’s the first of the charts for January!
As you can see, a huge portion of the month was focused on e-ARCs, so for blog tours and just in general on my review schedule. I did listen to quite a few audiobooks and even some that I bought! Those have to backlist so overall I’m not too displeased with my actual reading breakdown.
I love how there are some that are exactly the same, like Contemporary and Romance. I’ve been wanting to read a bit more variety this year and the Pondathon is helping because I am on a team where you get a bonus if you vary the genres! We can see in February if this fully goes into effect, since the Pondathon started about halfway through.
For YARC I read 12 books (YAY!) and 3 for SARC! Not as many as I would have liked, but it’s more than nothing! I want to put more charts in like the diversity of authors, characters, and how many books I’m reading for the challenges.
Love the charts, Lili! I’ve been focusing my reading on ARCs and the Wheel of Time series. I didn’t read this in January but a recent favourite read is The Ninth Sorceress by Bonnie Wynne.
Ohh adding to my TBR! Yeah I want to have more charts like on author diversity and character diversity, so hopefully for Feb *fingers crossed*