New Year's Reading Resolutions for 2018

Looking back upon my year of reading in 2017, I can’t help but feel as if I could have done better. Granted, there’s a point where reading A LOT can take over one’s motivations and it suddenly all becomes about page numbers and book totals and whether a novella is more of a short story (and therefore doesn’t count) or a true novel (which would totally count!). It’s not right to make reading all about the numbers. That would make reading more like math, and we certainly can’t have that.

Yet sometimes goals are good, because they force us to push our limits, shake us out of apathy, plunge us into deeper subjects than we’re used to swimming in, and generally make us leave our comfort zone. This is especially true in today’s society where reading is secondary to other forms of entertainment. In fact, that’s why I feel I could have done better; I feel my reliance on other media (TV, mostly) caused me to waste valuable free time that would have been more profitably spent reading.

I refuse to feel despondent about my self-supposed failure, though. Instead I choose to look toward 2018 with new resolve. Setting lofty goals may be setting myself up for failure…but what if I reached those goals? Often it’s more about proving yourself to yourself than to others.

As usual, my baseline goal next year was to read 100 books. Then I thought, “Why stop there? Why not up it to 125? To 150?”

I began a tentative list of titles, writing them down from memory. At first this was such slow going that I began to doubt (silly though it may be) that I might not have over 100 books in my TBR pile. (As I said, silly, right?)

Then I decided to log into my library account, where I have several categorized lists of books, from nonfiction and research to audiobooks, to general fiction, to theology. Copying these lists into my growing 2018 TBR pile proved tedious, however, so I began merely to count the list totals to get a general idea of how many more books I should look for.

I needn’t have bothered. The total was 176, well over my normal goal. And, mind you, this number only includes the library books I want to read, and not the books that have stagnated on my Kindle, or books that were given to me and sit patiently on my shelves, or even books I’ve seen on other people’s shelves that I mean to look into eventually.

Scanning my library lists has gotten me excited about the coming year. There are several titles that look strange and interesting, in addition to books that I’ve “been meaning to read” for a very long time, and maybe—just maybe—will get around to in the near future.

I also hope to FINALLY finish my Oxford Book of American Poetry, and perhaps even try some online reading challenges again—this is always a good way to guarantee I will sample different genres and find new favorite authors or book series.