GoodReads Reading Challenge

As the year is coming to an end, the ones of you who are using GoodReads (me included) are eager to complete their 2021 Reading Challenge. Today, I wanted to talk about this challenge, and the impact it had on me.

I’ve always loved reading. As I grew up, my shelves would get heavier and heavier with all kinds of books : novels, mangas, comics, poetry, short stories collection, history books, academic books and so on. But the more I was growing up, the less time I had to read. By the time I started my career, I was barely reading a book per year. Only fanfictions managed to slip through my busy schedule.

I thought it was normal, that I was just busy, and that I couldn’t do much about it. I felt sad, but I didn’t know what I could do about it. I was just so exhausted whenever I would go back home during the week, and in the weekends, I only wanted to sleep. I had trouble focusing, too.

After I had my breakdown in 2020, and decided to create my own business, I wanted to focus on self-care. Self-love. Everything I had not done up until now. Prioritizing me. Building a business doesn’t happen overnight, of course. So I had plenty of time to try and organize my life a little bit better. To work, but not to spend my whole life only working.

When I published my collection of poems in February 2021, I didn’t know about GoodReads. It was a friend who told me she had left me a review over there, since she had a huge following over there. And so I discovered GoodReads.

I’ve seen lots of critiques online about GoodReads, and the only thing I will say about this is that no platform is perfect. No matter what, as a reader, I really love it. And so I discovered that you could set a goal, a reading goal for the year, and loved the idea. I started with putting 15, because it already seemed to be a lot for me. In 2020, I got the chance to get back into reading more during the lockdown, but I was still under 10 books per year. 15 seemed to be a nice goal.

I love how you can say what you’re reading currently, update your progress, and once you’re done, leave a review. It’s a process that helped me a lot to keep track of what I was reading, and it’s a good reminder to always leave a review on the books you read, which is super important, especially for indie authors.

And so, as I discovered more and more authors in the writing community, especially on Twitter, joined a book club for a few months, and finally decided to use my e-book reader… I moved my goal higher and higher, and ended up at 30 books this year.

I know there are tons of people who read way more than that but… I’m so proud of this. I’ve never read that much in a year, (except perhaps when I was a teenager and reading tons of mangas haha) and I’m looking forward to a lot of reading next year, too.

I also like how GoodReads give you some stats about your year of reading, like the number of pages you’ve read. To be honest, mine should be so much higher if only there was a way of counting fanfictions in these readings stats hahaha. I can’t say how many words or pages I’ve read on AO3, but I know there were several fanfics that were around (or more than) 100,000 words so haha.

Anyway.

Are you using GoodReads ? Did you achieve your reading goal for this year ?

I hope you all have a beautiful day, and see you next Wednesday !

Marie.