Bookish confessions of 2018 & Resolutions for 2019 :)

Hello friends! Well, now that we are at the beginning of a new year, it’s inevitable to look back and reflect on the past reading year and think about what I can change to make it better. I never thought about my ‘reading year’ before, but having a blog and entering into the book community made me change my reading habits a lot. I loved connecting to so many book lovers, publishers, reading so many books and ARCs, it was fantastic! But, I also want to change some things that didn’t work for me 🙂

When I looked at my Goodreads list of books I read this year, I realised this fact:

1. I loved ONLY 25% of 130 books I read this year. It’s a pretty pathetic ratio and a lot of time lost on average or below average books.
2. 55% of them were new releases/or even proofs that are not released yet. And a good chunk was recently published books from past year or so.
3. Although I’m a big classics fan, I only read 9 classic books, which is really a shame.
4. I also never read 130 book in a year, which is a big number for me. I’m very happy and proud. But, also, when I look back, I feel like I’ve been in a race to read more, more new books, more ARCs…And this decreased the joy I was feeling reading a book slowly, enjoying my time with it.
5. I also feel like I wasn’t totally free in my choices, as again I leaned towards the new toys too much not to fall behind when everybody was talking about a new book. This caused me feel like I was consuming books, not enjoying/indulging them as much as I could.

Sooooo, after analysing my year, seeing these facts, and feeling uneasy about my reading for some time now, I came up with a few thoughts I’ll try to apply in 2019. I don’t like to call them RULES, because then I will try to break them 🙂 Let’s call them WISHES 🙂

1. Shop from my own home library: Here is my confession. I have 820 unread physical books in my library, and 140 e-books on my Kindle. Yes, you read right! My Tsundoku doesn’t have limits. I love collecting books, classics editions, and I’m very proud of my shelves. It’s my thing 🙂 But, what I need to change is to reach to my own library more and more to enjoy the books I actually selected.
2. Less new toys: Although, I love reading new releases, proofs, I decided to be more selective on this. I realised these books are a bit ‘unknown’ territory as we’re the first ones reading, and honestly, the probability of them being fantastic is low more than high from my experience. I will definitely read very anticipated releases coming from authors I already love, or ones I’m very curious about, but racing through all new books is just not possible, and not something I want to do. I want a good balance of new and existing books.
3. No blog tours: I realised this is also something that kills my joy to read. Setting a deadline that I need to finish the book is just not for me. I want to be free about when to read a book. I also think there’s a lot of pressure on an honest review when it’s a blog tour. I have commitments during Jan-Feb, but after completing those, I won’t participate. I will certainly write lots of reviews of course 🙂
4. More Classics: As I mentioned, I’m actually a fan of classics, and you can’t even tell looking at my blog. I have so many beautiful editions, collections, and so many unread, almost guaranteed good books (that’s why they are classics, right?). So, I’m definitely going back to my habit of indulging the classics in 2019.
5. Re-read Harry Potter 🙂 : I don’t re-read books. There are so many books, so little time that I don’t want to lose that time re-reading something I read already. But, I will make an exception to this habit and re-read Harry Potter because I just want to 🙂 And maybe a couple of classics that I read when I was very young, and I can’t remember anything about them except that I loved them.

I won’t even enter the territory of authors I want to read, very famous books I want to read, etc. Too many of them, and I want it to be more spontaneous, so let’s say this will be automatically covered if I reach for my own library more 🙂

So, here we are guys. I’m really happy I put this in writing as it makes me even more excited to start a new reading year adjusting my habits to enjoy and fall back in love with reading! I hope I’m not alone out there feeling like this, and it inspired some of you. Please tell me your resolutions, and thoughts? I’d love to hear.

I wish you all a happy new year ahead full of joy, happiness and fantastic books!

Umut