Top Ten Tuesday — Bookish Goals for 2023

Top Ten Tuesday moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.

https://www.thatartsyreadergirl.com/top-ten-tuesday/

Topic for January 17: Bookish Goals for 2023

I am not very goal oriented in my private life. Work is about goals. Private life is for doing what I want, when I want. Or not. Anyway, I do have some ideas about this year‘s reading.

1. Read fewer buddy reads in 2023 — odd, I know. But I committed to so many buddy reads last year that I did not have any room for mood reads. I ticked off my list, following a schedule. It started to feel like work.
2. Read fewer books than last year — the next odd one. I did set my usual 100-book-challenge on Goodreads and The StoryGraph, but I am considering to lower it or maybe completely delete it. I don‘t need it for tracking purposes and I am trying to de-stress my reading life.
3. Reduce my Netgalley pile — I have 20 unread Netgalleys and some of them are really ancient. It would be sweet to finally get caught up. And then I would only request more with the expectation to actually read and review them close to their publishing date, as it was intended.
4. Don‘t commit to reading challenges — again, it’s about de-stressing my reading life. Regardless, I have actually picked two challenges. One is the 2023 bingo challenge of my favourite Goodreads group. It‘s about reading previous, missed buddy reads. I don‘t expect to get a bingo, it‘s more of a tracker for books I own from those old buddy reading lists. And i picked an Alphabet challenge on Storygraph. I will only use it to help me pick books from my owned bookshelves.
5. Reduce my TBR pile of owned books and buy fewer new books — I failed at this last year. I finally want to make a dent in my physical bookshelf. Buying no new books is an illusion. I don‘t want to set any rules either, aka only buy a new book after reading 3 old ones. That would just stress me out, plus I would need to track it. More tracking = less reading.
6. Finally continue with the Dragonriders of Pern — a few years ago I decided to re-read the series plus to read all the new ones that I never picked up. I was off to a good start and had fun, but last year I was so overbooked that I didn‘t read a single one of them.
7. Mix it up — I have been reading a lot of SF and Fantasy in the last few years. I want to mix it up a little more. There is enough choice on my owned bookshelves…
8. Don‘t overthink it, more mood reading!

That‘s it for now. How about you? Do you have any new goals, besides the usual „read x books this year“, „read more classics“, „read more non-fiction“, etc.?