Friday, January 9, 2015

2014 Goals Wrap-Up

 [For those of you who are curious here's how I was doing at my half-wayish check-in point.]

(1) Read three hundred books.

 For those of you that had read my previous goal check-in post I had mentioned that I had lowered my goal because I had discovered that trying to read three hundred books in a single year while in graduate school was impossible...at least for me. I had also stated that I had lowered it to what I thought was a more manageable two hundred books [manageable because I had met this goal every year prior, at least every year that I had been on Goodreads]. 

And I managed to hit that goal on December 26, 2015. I honestly didn't think that I was going to be able to do it but somehow I pulled through and did it early. No idea how that happened!

(2) Read ten classics.

  Surprisingly enough, at least to me, I managed to kick this goal's butt. I not only met my goal of reading ten classes, I exceeded it by FOUR. For me this is pretty darn amazing.

The classics I managed to read in 2014 are as follows: Hamlet by William Shakespeare, The Tempest by William Shakespeare, The Journey to the East by Hermann Hesse, The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin, The Gift of the Magi and Other Stories by O. Henry, As You Like It by William Shakespeare, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, The Art of War by Sun Tzu, Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman,  Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, and Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte.

(3) Read books outside of my comfort zone. 

I don't think I've done as well with this as I would have liked. I have varied my reading so I'm not just reading tons of young adult and historical romances, so that is a start. But I haven't really read that many books that are completely a departure from my interests. Aside from one noir-esque detective story that I picked up and found out that I enjoyed a fair bit.

Yes, I've read tons of comics and graphic novels but those have never been out of my comfort zone really. I just haven't read a lot of them in recent years, an unfortunate circumstance really. So I don't feel comfortable claiming that it is a new world for me, just a rediscovery of an old one.

I did however finally take the plunge this year into Adult Fantasy rather than just sticking with YA or MG and that was well worth it. Not exactly a big jump for me as I've always loved fantasy but enough of a jump that I feel I should mention it because for awhile now I've been rather iffy on reading outside of the YA genre, unless I've had to for school specifically.

So I'm going to say that I did okay on this goal, but I could definitely do better, and hope to do better, in the future.

How did you guys do on the goals that you set for yourselves in 2014?

2 comments:

  1. I'm still seriously impressed with 200 books! I barely made 125 at literally the last day of 2014, haha! But seriously, congrats on making your goals as you defined them by the end ;-)

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    1. Aw, thank you, Anya! <3 I have a feeling I will really be scrambling for my book count this year despite really lowering it...again. Grad school just goes and complicates everything. @.@ But thank you so much.

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