Reading Goals for 2023

Last year I challenged myself to read 69 books, more for the lols than anything else. And that was... a mistake. Chasing what was for me a too-high number led to some bad habits. 

1. I included books I read to my kids— only the ones that took more than one sitting to get through, but still, not really in the spirit of the challenge. It is nice to keep track of what we read together, but there are other ways to do that.

2. I began choosing books more for their length and readability over better, more salient factors, like how interesting a book looked, or how excited I was to learn about a subject or return to a particular author.

3. I didn’t allow myself to DNF books or even take breaks from books that weren’t working for me because I was hyper-fixated on a number. 

So my goals for this year are: 

1. Read fewer books! 24 seems about right. Or maybe not even do a number challenge at all. It was a good exercise, at first, to keep me on track when I was getting back into the habit of reading a few years ago. But lately, it’s become a hindrance to my enjoyment more than anything else.

2. Read longer books, and read more deeply.

3. Read more books by women and/or gnc people). Over 2/3rd of what I read last year was written by men, and I'd like to get closer to an even split, if not overcorrect. 

4. Read more "classics." I have copies of "War and Peace," "Ulysses," and "Don Quixote," staring at me from my shelves but the first might be a reread of "Pride and Prejudice."

This time it’s annotated!

The nice thing about these goals is that there’s really not a whole lot I can get wrong. I’m back to reading simply because I like reading. And I’ve just now decided to refer to what it is I get out of reading as “the three Es,” which are Enjoyment, Enrichment, and Education.