Top Five Bookish Resolutions

Top 5 Tuesday is a weekly meme created by Shanah @Bionic Book Worm, and is now being hosted by Meeghan @Meeghan Reads. You can check out last week’s post here!

Welcome to my first Top Five Tuesday post of 2022! I’m so excited to start doing these again.

This week’s topic is about our Top Five Bookish Resolutions. I sort of touched on this in my last Top Five post as well (curse my inability to look ahead!) so to try not to overlap with that post too much, I’m going to focus only on book related goals, and keep things pretty specific. With any luck these will be the resolutions I actually keep this year.

Let’s get started!

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Top Five Bookish Resolutions

Request More ARCs from NetGalley

Guilty confession: I’ve rarely used NetGalley since I signed up early last year. It’s dumb, but it’s also partly due to my own burn out; I just didn’t have the time or energy to start requesting copies. Which is such a shame because that’s pretty much the entire reason I started this blog – reading more awesome books!

This year, I want to start regularly requesting ARCs, mostly fantasy and science-fiction, but anything that catches my eye will get a request. Even if I don’t receive a copy every time, I’m hoping I can get at least a few new books to read and promote among the endless piles of my book hoard.

With that said…

Start and Stick to a Book Buying Ban

If this one seems like a contradiction to my last goal… well it is, but hear me out. I have a bad habit of buying pretty much any book that catches my eye. There’s nothing I love more than finding a new book. In theory, this does wonders to increase my collection of fantastic titles, but in practice every new edition just buries me deeper in my TBR pile.

So, to try and make a dent in the hoard, I plan to not buy any books – old, new, audio, electronic, paperback, or hardcover – for the entire summer: June, July, and August. Maybe that will finally motivate me to actually root through my endless TBR and actually read a few novels buried there.

Which is the perfect lead up to my next resolution…

Have Under 100 Books on my Goodreads TBR

I’m pretty much the worst when it comes to TBRs because I’ve almost never seen or heard of a new title I didn’t immediately want to add to my list. I love books, but it doesn’t help my actual reading goals to keep stockpiling new titles on my Goodreads page. I swear I’m more like a book magpie than a dragon.

So by the end of 2022, I want to have less than one hundred books on my Want to Read list. And if that means not adding more books, or actually reading the books I already have, then that’s what I’ll have to do.

And now to totally contradict myself…

Read More Books by Self-Published Authors

I know, I know, I just said I need to stop looking for more books. And I do, but I think in this case, I can make an exception. Honestly, it wasn’t until I started this blog and began reviewing self-published works that I realized just how much I was missing by only buying from mainstream publishers.

Don’t get me wrong, I love traditionally published books just as much, but there’s an entire world of talent out there that I was woefully unaware of until just recently. Some of my favourite books have come from self-published and indie authors, and I would love nothing more than to find some new releases to add to that growing collection.

Speaking of new releases…

Read More Books Released in 2022

Probably my biggest sin as a book blogger is how long it takes me to pick up new releases.

Actually, that’s not true, I pick them up very quickly, I just manage to get distracted afterwards for years at a time while the book world moves on without me.

I’ve decided that 2022 is going to be the year I put a stop to that. So along with requesting books from NetGalley, I’m also goin to make a list of new releases to buy and read in the same month.

… or at least in the same year.. or two years? Can’t change too much in one year, after all. But I’m certainly going to try! After all, I started this blog to talk about awesome books, so I should at least try to keep up with the conversation.

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There we are: my Top Five Bookish Resolutions for 2022. Like any resolution, we’ll have to see how well I manage to keep up with them throughout the year. But as none of them involve me going to the gym, I’d say I have a fairly good chance of succeeding.

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Do you have any resolutions for the new year? Any predictions as to how well you’ll do by the end of 2022? Or how well I’ll do? Let me know in the comments.

Thanks for reading everyone! See you when I next emerge from the hoard. Check out more of my posts below!