It’s the first week of January so that means it’s time to look back on the reading I did last year. In 2017 I read 70 books (beating my goal of 50) and reviewed 51 of them, beating my goal to review 25 of them – you can find all the books I read here. There were some pretty great ones too, so you can find my top ten books of 2017 here.

I had some other reading-related goals that I mostly completed. I put £1 in a jar for every book I read so I finished the year with £70 to put into my bank account – it’s going towards fun stuff like rent. I also continued with my Read the World Project with 29 of the books I read in 2017 being for that project.

I did want to finish 2017 with 50 books or less on my TBR but that didn’t happen. I started the year with 87 books and finished it with 100. Oops! This was from a combination of subscription boxes and generally poor impulse control when there were deals on either in a bookshop or on Amazon.

Now this wasn’t a goal or anything, but I do like to have a look at who’s writing what I read. I generally aim to have an even split between male and female authors and in 2017 I read slightly more books by women. The 10% both come from a mixture of short story collections and graphic novels.

Now I’m looking towards the future and my reading goals for 2018.

I’m keeping them relatively simple, though this year I’ve signed up for a couple of reading challenges as well to keep me on my toes.

Broadly speaking, I want to read at least 52 books in 2018 and review at least half of them. I’m going to continue to put £1 in a jar for every book I read so I can have a nice bonus at the end of the year again and once again I’m going to say I will try and get my TBR down to 50 books. I think I need to be a bit honest with myself about some of my books, if I don’t think I’m going to read them I need to send them on to a new home, whether that friends or a charity shop. I’d like to also keep a 50/50 split of male and female authors read in 2018, but if I read more books by women I wont be too annoyed. I will also being continuing with my Read the World Project. I’m going to have to be reading more books from around the world this year if I want to complete this task in the next four years – I’ve got about 160 countries left to go!

As I mentioned before I’ve signed up to some reading challenges this year – three of them. They are the Beat the Backlist, where the aim is to read as many of the books sitting on your shelves that were published before 2018, the A to Z Reading Challenge, where you’ve got to read 26 books that start with every letter of the alphabet, and the Monthly Motif Reading Challenge which is to read a book each month that fits the theme set. You can find out more about all these challenges here.

So those are my reading goals for 2018. Do you set yourself yearly reading goals? If you do, I wish you the best of luck and I hope you read some awesome books this year.