After a few years of not hitting my reading goals (due to reading a ton of fanfic, too much choice, and forgetting to update Goodreads), I delighted myself by hitting my goal of 60 books read in 2022 back in August, with Leigh Bardugo’s King of Scars. I’m at 71 books read now, since I just wrapped up Nghi Vo’s Siren Queen yesterday (a truly heady, delicious book, full of body horror and magic and featuring an unexpected Tam Lin-inspired sequence!), and I should be at 72 by the end of the day, since I treated myself to a reread of Winterlong by Elizabeth Hand.

This isn’t to brag — not that I think many people read this to begin with, so if anything I’m boasting into the void — but what’s different about this year than others? I can only use COVID-related anxiety as a partial excuse (that anxiety drove me headlong into new fandoms, and new fanfic, for months), but I think this year being a success was thanks to a few factors:

1. I actually got organized! Not that I necessarily stuck to it every month, but I started choosing a list of about five to six books at the beginning of each month that I would then choose from as I needed a new book. This let me not only trim down my ever-growing TBR pile (not by much, but what’s a TBR pile that doesn’t fight every effort to trim it down?), but helped me avoid feeling overwhelmed by too much choice. I have a lot of books I want to read, and almost as many I want to reread, so having a plan — and a narrow field to pick from, instead of the vastness of my entire backlog — kept me organized and on track.
2. As soon as I finished one book, I usually immediately started the next. As in, moments afterward. In knitting, there’s this idea of “second sock syndrome” — it can be hard to keep up the momentum to finish a pair of socks after you knit the first one, so what many people advise is starting the second one right away, even if you only knit a few rows. I used the same principle here (and a similar one in writing: whenever I finish a scene or chapter, I always try to write a few more lines, just to give me some power going into the next writing session). Even just choosing the next book to read right away seemed to help.
3. The excitement of posting about each new book I read, both on Goodreads and on Twitter, where I have a running thread with each update, was also a great incentive. Sometimes social media is kind-of sort-of okay!
4. I discovered I really, truly love putting the physical books I read on my shelves, if I decide to keep them. I also really, truly love reorganizing my bookcases, but that’s a different story. Sidenote: I need more bookcases.

These are probably old news, but they got me moving! I’m not in competition with anyone, but it’s been really lovely to challenge myself to read more, and to read widely. While I was on vacation this summer, I even had a little readathon to see how much I could read in 48 hours (lots of Angela Carter, apparently) — I’ll definitely be repeating that in December, over my winter break!

As for what I want to read over the rest of this month, I’d like to read through a few of the samples I downloaded for fantasy romance novels (a true but delicious weakness of mine), finish Winterlong, reread The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers — and after that, who knows? I’ll need to check out my list, and make a new one for October.