2024 Goodreads Challenge
Creating this tag for detailing my progress on this year’s Goodreads challenge. It’s the first time I will talk about Goodreads in this blog, so might as well tell a short story about how I came to know about it.
I discovered Goodreads from being a Tumblr kid back in the day. I joined the platform June of 2012 and have read 178 books since then (a number that is quite lower to my liking, if I am to be honest). Goodreads has a yearly challenge. At the start of the year you set the number of books you want to read and monitor your progress on your profile. According to Goodreads, my ass is currently 9 books behind schedule.
Here is my trend since the first time I participated:
January of this year, I arbitrarily thought that 500 is a good number of books to read.
The question is why.
Why the challenge? It’s an observed trait of mine that it’s difficult for me to do things without the fear of an imminent deadline. In fact, it’s usually in the last months of the year that I go overtime and inhale books just to catch up with my year’s goal – which is something I want to change so bad. That is why I am looking inward and getting in touch with my personal reasons of why I read, which brings us…
Why books? Words comfort me, and I genuinely love story. Books are just a special medium. I like that I can control the pacing, and that I can go over details any time. I like the smell and feel of books, words printed on paper. I do read eBooks, too. But I have so many untouched books on my shelves that I feel guilty whenever I see them all lined up, not having served their purpose in my life. Their story I have yet to know. I am concerned about how there are too many good books in the world I have yet to read, sometimes I think about books lost in time or told in languages I don’t understand. All the insight and knowledge I am missing out on.
Reading is a form of consumption I rarely feel guilty doing (unless it’s been twelve hours straight and my back has merged to the bed). I can go over a line, a paragraph, or a page, over and over. Fully immerse myself with the beauty of words. Whenever I read, I tend to internalize and relate what I read to my own reality. I want to write myself (hence all the word vomit of this blog) and do it well like all my favorite authors.
I discovered Goodreads from being a Tumblr kid back in the day. I joined the platform June of 2012 and have read 178 books since then (a number that is quite lower to my liking, if I am to be honest). Goodreads has a yearly challenge. At the start of the year you set the number of books you want to read and monitor your progress on your profile. According to Goodreads, my ass is currently 9 books behind schedule.
Here is my trend since the first time I participated:
- 2015 – 6/100 (what a dreamer I was)
- 2016 – 3/20
- 2017 – 20/20
- 2018 – 20/50
- 2019 – 12/20
- 2021 – 15/12
- 2022 – 23/20
- 2023 – 25/25
January of this year, I arbitrarily thought that 500 is a good number of books to read.
The question is why.
Why the challenge? It’s an observed trait of mine that it’s difficult for me to do things without the fear of an imminent deadline. In fact, it’s usually in the last months of the year that I go overtime and inhale books just to catch up with my year’s goal – which is something I want to change so bad. That is why I am looking inward and getting in touch with my personal reasons of why I read, which brings us…
Why books? Words comfort me, and I genuinely love story. Books are just a special medium. I like that I can control the pacing, and that I can go over details any time. I like the smell and feel of books, words printed on paper. I do read eBooks, too. But I have so many untouched books on my shelves that I feel guilty whenever I see them all lined up, not having served their purpose in my life. Their story I have yet to know. I am concerned about how there are too many good books in the world I have yet to read, sometimes I think about books lost in time or told in languages I don’t understand. All the insight and knowledge I am missing out on.
Reading is a form of consumption I rarely feel guilty doing (unless it’s been twelve hours straight and my back has merged to the bed). I can go over a line, a paragraph, or a page, over and over. Fully immerse myself with the beauty of words. Whenever I read, I tend to internalize and relate what I read to my own reality. I want to write myself (hence all the word vomit of this blog) and do it well like all my favorite authors.
* * *
2024 Year in Books
- A Separate Peace by John Knowles
- You, Again by Kate Goldbeck
- The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood
- I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki by Baek Se Hee
- Mean Streak by Sandra Brown
- Mirror Image by Sandra Brown
- White Oleander by Janet Fitch
- Term Limits by Vince Flynn
- Boundaries by Dr. Henry Cloud & Dr. John Townsend
- Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Persuasion by Jane Austen
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
- The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
- Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport
- Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte
- Inferno by Dante Alighieri
- Ikigai by Hector Garcia
- Code Girls by Liza Mundy
- The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
- Solitude: A Return to the Self by Antony Storr
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
- The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
- Yellowface by R.F Kuang
- The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab
2024 Challenge Recap
I was short by ten books. There were just too many months in the middle when I did not read at all. It’s the nonfiction books that put me in longer slumps, so I need to find the balance with fiction titles. Somehow, I also had a problem with my Currently Reading shelf. I was pressured to finish books I was not interested in anymore.
Books read as of date: 192/500
