Much like TBRs become graveyards of aspirations unless you actually make a point of reading the books on them, goals are also useless unless you follow up on them. How did I do for 2024?
1. At least 48 books
I made it, but not as successfully as other years, not helped by the fact that I spent a lot of reading hours on Trois femmes puissantes. As usual, end of the year emergency reading helped pad the numbers after the inevitable dip.
2. At least 4 books in French
By the absolute skin of my teeth, and only because I managed to re-read two short books over the holidays. I probably make this hard for myself by reading any given French book at least three, if not four times: first in French, then a Swedish or English translation, then another Swedish or English translation, and then in French again.
3. At least 25% of books in Swedish
Absolutely crushed this. Storygraph tells me it’s 35.8%.
4. At least 12 non-fiction books
Crushed this, too. Finished twelve non-fiction books by September. By the end of the year it was twenty-two.
5. At least 12 books that have been in my library for over a year
This ended up at ten:
– Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture
– Ödestimman (this is a bit of a cheat, it was a one-act play in a collection with other pieces I’d already read)
So I failed this one, but I’m also not sure why I opted for twelve books in this category rather than ten. Maybe because that’s how the Storygraph challenge I was using to track this was set up? I think for 2025 I’ll scale this down to ten, regardless of what other people on Storygraph want to do. Averaging one a month in addition to everything else I like to accomplish seems a bit of a reach, and the more progress I make on this goal, quite frankly the fewer books I have left to tackle. It seems I’ve finally started to pump the brakes on my bookish acquisitions.
6. At least 10 books from my to-read list (as of January 1, 2024).
One of the few criticisms to be leveraged at Storygraph is that there doesn’t appear to be a “date added” function on the to-read section. I’ve been updating this post as I go and relying on my memory when it comes to “but when did I add that again?”
– Summer
– The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe
– This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt is Shaping the Twenty-First Century
7. At least half are by women or enby authors
Excluding collections and collabs, this was 24 women and 20 men.
8. At least 10% of books from Black authors
Currently six, not counting the essays in “Black to the Future” from Flame Wars. For a total of 53 books that means I exceeded my goal of 10%. It’s a little disappointing that I could only reach it through a concerted effort, but on the positive side I had plenty of Black authors to choose from on my TBR. As the recommendations from Karavan start to pile up I expect I’ll reach this threshold (maybe exceed it?) automatically, the same with my non-fiction reading and women/enby authors.
9. A book from at least one new-to-me country (as of January 1, 2024)
Two this year: Senegal and Syria. Here’s the map so far:
Happy reading in the new year!
