Mid Year Reading Goals Check In

[forestofglory]

Well 2018 is almost halfway over so I thought I'd see how I'm doing with my reading goals. So far this year I've read 65 books (according to my not always perfect goodreads account). That puts me on track to read a lot less that total books this year compared to last year when I read 161 books, but still a bit more than 2016 when I read 104 books. This makes sense to me -- the world has been a lot lately and I'm finding it harder to sink into a book, and also having a harder time with heavy books. I've started an decided not to finish a lot of books recently because of these issues.

So with that in mind lets go over my reading goals one by one.

Read 24 new to me non-white authors
Read so far:9
So, not on track here. This goal has been a real struggle -- I just want to read happy fluffy things and the books by non-white authors that I see get the most attention are all downers and I can't read then right now. In fact I have bunch of books like this on my TBR and they are probably just going to keep sitting there for a while. So if you have any recs for me here that would be great. Comics and Manga count too!

Reread 20 books
Reread so far:6
I don't know what's up with my brain and rereading. I'd think rereading would be great when I'm want something comforting but my brain keeps reminding me of all the bad things about any book I consider rereading and then I don't want to reread it anymore in case I don't like it after all. Which seems unproductive. I don't know brains are strange.

Read 10 Scholarly Books (defined as experts writing about the thing they are expert in)
Read so far:5
Hey I'm on track for this one! Yay!

Read 1 book that's over a 100 years old
Read so far:0
Well there's still time but will I have the mental energy? We shall see.

Well that's not great but it could be worse. Did you set yourself any reading goals? If so how are you doing?

Comments

[qian]

Re non-white authors, I find this as well (that the ones that get buzz/attention tend to be pretty depressing and/or intense). I tweeted about some cheerful PoC-authored books recently though:

BREADFRUIT by Celestine Vaite
HAIRDRESSER OF HARARE by Tendai Huchu
AYA by Marguerite Abouet
Karen Lord's REDEMPTION IN INDIGO
Fishball's MY GIANT GEEK BOYFRIEND
Moni Mohsin's DUTY FREE

Apart from AYA which is a graphic novel, Fishball which is a webcomic collection (hard to find outside Malaysia but you can find her webcomic online) and REDEMPTION IN INDIGO which is fantasy, they're actually all what you might call "women's fiction". Or mainstream commercial, I guess? Anyway, in case you haven't read them and would like to try them out!

[forestofglory]

Thank you! I haven't heard of most of these but women's fiction is genre I want to explore more so I will look into them.