2018 Reading Goals & progress

Hi there! (if you happen to be reading this)

This blog post is mainly for myself to keep track of my progress on my reading goals throughout 2018. Making them public might motivate me more to actually achieve them (my 2017 reading goals were a mess). Maybe you’ll also find some inspiration for your own reading goals from this post.

Main goals

• Finish some series (instead of just reading the 1st book of every series!)
• Read more adult fantasy
• Read more classics
• Read an anthology
• Read 3 books before you buy a new one
  • Already failed so hard at this, since I now actually have bookshelves I don’t want them to be half-empty.
• Read one TBR jar-pick a month
  • I didn’t meet this goal in January because I was in a huge reading slump. I’ll double-up another month. 
• Read the books that I’ve owned since 2015
• Read an e-book
• Read more books by Tolkien
• Re-read books more often
• Goodreads goal = 75 books

Below follow a list of books to read for the goal of reading books I’ve owned since 2015 and the list of series I’d like to finish.

Books I’ve owned for EVER (the 2015 list)

1. 1984
2. Hitchhiker’s Guide complete collection
3. Books by Tess Gerritsen
4. The Circle
5. The Hunchback of the Notre Dame
6. The Three Musketeers
7. Good Omens
8. The Never Ending Story
9. Star Wars
10. Across the Universe
11. Graceling
12. Cress
13. The Diviners

Series to finish off in 2018 (being very optimistic)

1. The Mistborn trilogy – Brandon Sanderson
2. The Six of Crows duology – Leigh Bardugo
3. The Lunar Chronicles – Marissa Meyer
4. Blood of Eden trilogy – Julie Kagawa
5. Queen of the Tearling trilogy – Erika Johansen
6. The Hunger Games trilogy – Suzanne Collins
7. The Illuminae Files trilogy – Amie Kaufman & Jay Kristoff
8. The Starbound series (maybe including the short stories) – Amie Kaufman & Meagan Spooner
9. Wayward Children (trilogy?) – Seanan McGuire
10. The Magicians trilogy – Lev Grossman
11. The Remnant Chronicles trilogy – Mary E. Pearson

2018 Releases

It’s a bit late for 2018 anticipated releases at the end of January, but I’ll go through them nonetheless. Otherwise I can’t keep track of them all throughout the year, I tend to get really excited about new releases and then forgot to pick up half of them. I’m not sure yet if I’ll read all of them. Libraries in The Netherlands don’t have these types books and I don’t have unlimited resources. I’ll probably buy most of them in 2019. I’m listing my reasons for being interested in reading these, if you want to see the plot and other info, please use the Goodreads links I inserted.

Is it me or are there a looot of awesome books coming out this year? *grabby hands*

January

The Cruel Prince (The Folk of the Air #1) by Holly Black

People are raving about this book on social media. I love faeries, but I first want to read the only book by Black that I own: ‘The Darkest Part of the Forest’. If I enjoy that one, I’ll get on this series.

Spookathon & Dewey’s progress

This is just a short blog post keeping up with my progress for the Spookathon and the Dewey’s 24 hour Read-a-thon. For information about these readathons, as well as my TBR, please look at the TBR post.

Spookathon progress

Spookathon started very slowly. I had to work a lot more (over-hours) than I expected, so I barely read anything on Monday – Wednesday. I read a few stories from Horror Stories, I tried to get into Black Mad Wheel but wasn’t really feeling it. Then I decided to take Thursday and Friday off, as I barely take days off and had so many left. During those days I read a couple of more stories from Horror Stories. However, during the weekend before this week, I had already started Jurassic Park and I enjoyed it at the time, so I decided to pick that back up. After that I mainly read from Jurassic Park until the start of the Dewey’s 24 hour readathon, which for me started at Saturday 21st of October 2:00 PM.

• Finished Jurassic Park: a thriller + a book with a spooky setting (jungle with dinosaurs)
• Finished Horror Stories: a book with orange on the cover, a book with a spooky word in the title (‘horror’), and a childhood fear (one of the stories was about home invasion, and multiple about the dark)

Completed all the challenges! I read 740 pages in total for this one: I read all of Horror Stories, all of Jurassic Park (minus 35 pages which I already read the week before) and 95 pages of Silence of the Lambs.

Dewey’s progress

I’m starting Dewey’s with the following page count:

Jurassic Park – start page 200

Horror Stories –  start page 75

Black Mad Wheel – start page 0

I’m hoping to finish the top two books and get far into Black Mad Wheel. However, if I find I’m not enjoying Black Mad Wheel, I might pick up Silence of the Lambs instead.

TBR for Spookathon & Dewey’s Read-a-thon

Hi all!

There are some read-a-thons happening this month, I’ll be taking part in two of them: #Spookathon and Dewey’s Read-a-thon.

Spookathon is hosted by @booksandlala , @paigespageskc and @shannon_said. It takes place from October 16-22. Information can be found on the Twitter account for this read-a-thon. There are five challenges you can try to complete, though this is not mandatory:

• read a thriller
• read a book with a spooky word in the title
• read a book based on a childhood fear
• read a book with orange on the cover
• read a book that has a spooky setting

I will try to complete all the challenges, but I will be using only a few books to do so, combining some challenges per book. Also, some challenges can be completed by muliple books. As I might not be able to read all of them, I list some of the challenges multiple times. For me this is the perfect read-a-thon at this time, as I have been in the mood to read all the scary books.

I will also be participating in Dewey’s 24 hour read-a-thon, which will take place on October 21st. For more information and starting times, please check their website and Twitter account. I think this will be my third time participating. The idea is to just read as much as you can during those 24 hours. Some people try to read for 24 hours straight, some just try to read more than they normally would in a day. I always try to read as many hours as I can, but I usually do sleep for about six hours in between, as for me the read-a-thon usually starts on Saturday 2 PM, so it includes a full night. This time around, I will try to read the books that are leftover from my Spookathon TBR that I haven’t gotten to during the week/Monday-Friday.

#TheReadingQuest Progress

For information about The Reading Quest, please take a look at my TBR post here.

I’ll use this blog post to keep track of my questing.

First up is the Mage path. Below you can see which books I intend to read and which ones I have already finished:

#TheReadingQuest TBR

Hi all!

I’m back doing another reading challenge/read-a-thon. This time I’m participating in The Reading Quest, created by the lovely Aentee of @readatmidnight. This reading challenge is inspired by video games and should be super fun!

For the challenge I am using the following bingo board, and I will tick off the squares that I have completed:

Bookish Fall Bingo TBR & progress

Bekka of prettydeadlyblog.com creates a bookish bingo chart for each season. Of course September, October and November fall under fall, so now it’s time for the fall bingo chart! I’ve seen some of the previous bingo charts, but I was always too late to join in. (This time I also thought of it quite late, but the 2 books I’ve read so far already fit the chart.)

The idea is that you read as many books, that fit the descriptions on the tiles, as possible. One book can grant you one tile. Once you have one row of tiles done (horizontal, vertical or diagonal) you have one BINGO. All the rules can be found here.

So here is the chart for this season:

Here are my choices for the bingo chart that I will be reading:

#Readthemallthon progress & wrap-up

Here I will keep track of my Pokémon Indigo League Read-a-Thon progress. You can find all the info on this read-a-thon on the blog of Aentee (@read at midnight).

My Pokémon is Walrein (the 3rd evolution stage of Spheal!):

Day 1 – August 14th

Read: 50 pages from HP 5 (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix)

Tweets: 2

Total CP today: +9

Current CP (including the 10 starting CP): 19

Day 2 – August 15th

Read: 20 pages from HP 5 (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) & 120 pages from The Song of Achilles.

Tweets: 2

Total CP today: + 18

Current CP : 37

July/August bookhaul

I’m not planning on buying anymore books this month (my wallet is empty), so I might as well post this now.

July

In July, I officially graduated from my first Masters in Law (cum laude) at University. Of course I felt I was entitled to buy myself something to celebrate this achievement. I bought Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone Illustrated Edition. I’ve had my eye on it since it came out but it never felt right to buy it for myself. The artwork is just stunning:

The good news is that I graduate from my second Masters in December, so that would be a good occasion to buy Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets Illustrated Edition 😉

 

August

In August I bought four books that were on sale online:

MID YEAR BOOK FREAK OUT TAG

MID YEAR BOOK FREAK OUT TAG 2016

So this tag, created by ReadLikeWildfire and Ely Jayne, has been going all around Booktube for the past couple of months. Although technically we’re already past ‘mid year’, I thought it would be fun to do this tag as a first tag on my blog. This tag is also really helpful to structure my thoughts on the books that I’ve read so far and on the ones that  I want to read in the next couple of months.

Let’s get to the questions!

1. Best book you’ve read so far in 2016.

This is a hard one! I have already so many great books this year. Three honorable mentions are: A Thousand Splendid Suns, Mistborn and Station Eleven.

But the winner is: Illuminae. This book really took me by surprise. I was actually afraid to read it because of the different format, which I did not expect to like. However, the format was very fitting for this book and it is so action packed with wonderful characters!