Goldilox and the Three Weres: Our 2018 Reading Challenges

For the last few years, we've both been doing the Rock My TBR challenge to try reduce the number of unread books on our shelves. We'll recap how we did for the year in our December Month in Review post. The host isn't doing the challenge for 2018 so we're both trying something new. Here's what we're planning for 2018.

Gretl

I had to lower my Goodreads goal this year so I think I'm going to stick my two books a week since I've been able to meet that the last two years. (That's 104 books.) I feel like I need to strike a better balance between review books and fun books though, since I seem to have focused on one or the other for weeks at a time in 2017. This is the first year that I have more than a few ARCs that didn't get read. So I'm going to use my reading challenge to focus on those outstanding 2017 ARCs first and foremost. I'd also like to address the number of unread books I have from subscription boxes.

I'm doing the Beat the Backlist challenge hosted by Novel Knight. This challenge lets you set your own goals for reading books published in 2017 or earlier. (I'm going to count up those ARCs and Book Box books at the end of the year.) I've started a Goodreads shelf to keep track of my books and we'll include Challenge Recaps in our month end posts.

Beat the Backlist also has a team competition - I'm on the blue team, the Story Sorcerers. Each team earns points when members participate and has its own chat thread in the Beat the Backlist Goodreads group. And it has a weekly bookstagram prompt. (Yay!) So watch for those posts on our Instagram starting in January.

Rose Red

This year I'm keeping my reading goals as simple as possible. So like every year, I'll be setting a Goodreads goal. I like to set it to 52 books because I know that I can read at least one book a week. Most likely I'll read more than that so my unofficial goal is to read more than 200 books like I have the last couple years. Wish me luck!

I'm also doing the Beat the Backlist to help manage my physical TBR pile. At the time of this post, I have 267 unread books sitting on my shelves and I would like to get that total number down to 200 by the end of 2018. My official goal for this challenge will be to read 30 books off my physical TBR pile that have been published prior to December 31, 2017. Like Gretl, I started a Goodreads shelf for the challenge. The difference is that mine lists the books I want to get to for the challenge. Sadly, we both didn't end up on the same team. I'm am an official member of the Red Team aka the Book Bards! This challenge sounds like it's going to be really fun!

It's not really a challenge but to motivate myself to read my TBR books I'm going to do TBR bingo. I tried it out the last few months and it's been so much fun to do and I'm checking books off my TBR like crazy! Each quarter I'm going to make a new bingo card and try to read as many books on it as I can. I'll be doing a TBR post and recap for each bingo card. I'll be posting my Spring 2018 bingo card after the first of the year detailing my card. I need to see what else I get read this year before I make it.