Choosing to Book Blog Again + Goals

I really didn’t think I would be typing up this post for 2022, but here we are. It’s been a long while since I have posted anything on this blog. In all honesty, I struggled with book blogging in 2021. I have been blogging since 2009 across a number of blogs, and while I was able to keep up with my personal blog a lot more, In Want of Books struggled. While the reasoning behind that is going to come on Wednesday, I decided to focus this post on what’s coming in 2022 and my reading goals.

I didn’t realize until 2021 that I was incredibly unhappy with my blog because I had lost sight of why I was book blogging to begin with. Why did I want to keep up this blog? Did writing and sharing my reviews of books still bring me joy? Did I have the emotional and physical energy to keep up with this? In reality, I still don’t know all of the answers to these questions, but I do know that I don’t want to quit.

Instead, 2022 is going to be focused on getting back into my love of reading. In the past few years I have only wanted to read what’s popular and what everyone else was reading. I barely re-read any books because I was so scared that I was going to miss out. This, it turns out, was why I was no longer happy here: this blog was more about what I thought others wanted instead of what I wanted.

So, in 2022, my reading goals are going to reflect this. Again, I’ll talk more in depth about this on Wednesday’s post, but for now, here are my blogging/reading goals for 2022:

Blogging goal:

Post every Monday and Wednesday

I am giving myself some room here to breathe, but I think I can manage two posts a week for the first quarter. I will evaluate how I like this schedule at the end of March, but until then, I will have two posts go up every week.

Reading Goals:

100 books in a year

I debated on making this 75, and I might change it later on in the year, but for now, i want to keep up with the 100 books goal. I realized in 2021 that I could manage this as long as I broke down my goal into smaller chunks. I was less likely to get overwhelmed if I had to read 8 books in a month at the minimum versus thinking about the overall goal all the time.

Read more adult fantasy

After watching the second season of The Witcher, I really wanted to try out the books. I also began watching the first season of Wheel of Time and I knew that in 2022, I was going to try and read as many adult fantasy books as possible. So, here are the adult fantasies I’d like to get to:

–The Poppy War trilogy by RF Kuang

–The Green Bone Saga by Fonda Lee

–The Broken Earth trilogy by NK Jimisin
–The Inheritance trilogy by NK Jimisin
–The Withcer the by Andrzej Sapkowski–3 books at least
–Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan–3 books at least
–A Song of Ice and Fire by George RR Martin–3 books at least

Read and Review NetGalley Books

I don’t even want to admit how many books I have on my shelf that I have yet to read and review. My goal in 2022 is to not request any new ARCs and focus solely on reading as many of the books on my shelf as possible. I’m currently at 64% feedback ratio and I want to get to 80% by the end of the year.

For the time being, this is all the goals I have for reading in 2021. I am honestly getting a little overwhelmed already because I didn’t realize how long the fantasy books are! Regardless, I am going to try my hardest to achieve as many of these goals as possible. Of course, I would change or remove goals as necessary as I don’t want to burn out.

So, do you all have any reading goals for the new year? Let me know if you’ve read any of these adult fantasy books above or if you have any advice on getting my NetGalley ratio up!