The end of the year really snuck up on us, didn’t it? I feel like I still have so many other posts that I want to do, but haven’t been able to get to yet, including a couple of book reviews. Looks like the first week of January will be filled with a ton of 2021 roundups and whatnot.

I wanted to get this post out today because I’ll be including a link to my 2022 Reading Tracker Spreadsheet on Google Sheets for anyone who’d like to download it. I didn’t want to do just that though, so I’m sharing my reading goals for 2022 as well. I don’t believe I had any goals for 2021, other than my Goodreads Challenge, so it was an easy year of reading.

But, I like to complicate things.

1. Read 70 books. Pretty self-explanatory, and easy considering that’s my average for each year anyway. I’ll keep track of it mainly on Goodreads, as usual, and maybe this year I’ll try to get into using Storygraph. I have an account there, but I just have a hard time changing my habits.

2. Be more selective about the books I purchase. I do okay with this in general, but sometimes I have a tendency to buy a book without any second thoughts when I’m stressed because books make me feel better. However, this sometimes leads to me regretting the book purchase if I end up not liking the book or end up never reading it and giving it away anyway.

3. Make a dent in my physical TBR cart. I have about 79+ books sitting on my pretty little cart in the corner of my room with books that still need to be read. I’d like to try to read mostly from that cart this year. I know I won’t be able to read all my books from that cart, so that’s why I’d like to make a dent. At least read through one row of books.

4. Finish the Hercule Poirot short story collection. I started this monstrous book in 2020, but only got through about half the stories. There’s 55 of them, and they’re excellent stories (obviously) but for some reason I stopped reading it and just haven’t picked it up since August of 2020. I’d like to finish that collection by the end of 2022, dang it.

5. Read my NetGalley books in a timely manner. I always tend to push these until the last possible moment before they’re released. So this year I want to try to read them a good while ahead of when the books are published. I used to be good at this, but that was before I was getting a number of requests accepted at a time (I should probably also stop requesting so many as well…).

6. Finish the School for Good and Evil series. I started this series early enough in the year to have read all six books, but I only read four of them. Whoops. But that’s what happens when I’m not in a fantasy mood. So I plan to finish this series soon than later in the new year, and I’m hoping the final two books live up to the others.

7. Read three classics. This shouldn’t be too hard, though that depends on my reading mood throughout the year. I did select three classics for my upcoming post that lists 22 books I want to read this year, and none of my selections are very long, so it should be an easy task. Again, it’s more about my mood than the actual book, but I have been wanting to read more of the classics.

I always love starting off with a fresh spreadsheet. While it sucks to see it so empty, I love watching my stats change drastically in those first few weeks of the new year. As I have done the past two years since creating my spreadsheet (which I modeled off a few others), I will be sharing a free template of the one for 2022, which includes a little 25 Book Challenge if anyone was looking to do one. Or, you can modify the challenge to fit whatever one you may be doing this year.

All you need to do to get the spreadsheet is click on the image above, and once you’re on the spreadsheet page, you go over to File, then hit ‘Make a copy’ and save it to your drive. Then you can modify the spreadsheet as you please to fit your reading needs.

You should be able to just click the image below to be taken to the download page, and then you’ll have the card to mark up as you with – either as an image on your device or on paper.

I tried to make the challenge a little bit of an easier challenge, but I guess that also depends on each person as a reader. I think it’ll be fun if a few people actually decide to take up my challenge, and maybe if enough people do, I can do a raffle at the end of 2022 for a book giveaway. I might have to make an official announcement for that if I decide to do that.

I mean, I’ll probably do at least one or two giveaways this year anyway, but this would be a cool way to get entries.

Well, now that this beast of a post is over, that marks my final post of 2021! As I said, there will be more “end of year” and “new year” posts in the next week as I catch up on them all. I know for sure some upcoming ones will be a December Wrap-Up, a 2021 Reading Wrap-Up, and what books I want to try to read in 2022. Probably a review to two as well, at least to get a start on the new year.

Do you have any reading/bookish goals for the new year?