This week’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl is a traditional early January post and invites us to share our bookish goals for the year. First, let’s check in on my goals from last year:

1. Read 52 books. Done! It took me until the last day of the year, but I did tick them all off in the end.
2. Review books on blog. And publish my best of list(s). Ha! Pretty much I didn’t write on the blog last year other than Three Beautiful Things and the occasional Top Ten Tuesday post.
3. Buy books in another country. One of the highlights of 2024!
4. Read 2+ classics, including a Russian novel. Fail! Although I did buy a Russian classic to read.
5. Finish the Top 100 Children’s Books. No, but I made progress. I’m down to eight, seven of which are currently sitting next to the couch.
6. Read 17 of my own books including 5 I’ve owned 2+ years. Nyet. I read four, only one of which came to me pre-pandemic.
7. Listen to 20 audiobooks. So, so close. I finished 19 and had several more that I just couldn’t get across the finish line in time. (There were also two titles that I started in audio and switched to paper.)
8. Read 3+ books of poetry. Two.
9. Read 5+ books in translation. Three, although to be fair, I expected both of the last books I read to have been translated, and neither was.
10. Get all my books onto shelves. I made good progress. Although most of the books I culled are still sitting in a box in the living room waiting to go to Little Free Libraries or over to Arlington for their Friends’ book sale. I think with some serious finesse, I could maybe get the rest onto shelves this year.

Now, with that in mind what will this year’s goals look like?

1. Read 52 books. This is a good number for me. When I get a job, I may have less time to read. Or maybe I’ll go back to listening to books on metro and reading at lunch and then it’ll go up. Either way, I’m sticking with it.
2. Read 25 books I own, including some I don’t think I’ll want to keep. There is a post-in-progress about which books I’m hoping to include, but right now it leans heavily on books I want to keep.
3. Read more diversely. Usually I do a better job about reading books by BIPOC and queer authors, and without meaning to, in 2024, I only read 9 books that qualify. I’m aiming for at least 15 books this year.
4. Write at least 6 non-Top Ten Tuesday posts about books this year, including some assessment in the summer about how my reading is going.
5. Read more backlist titles. I only read 11 books that were published before 2020 last year. Tackling some of my personal library collection should help increase that number, but let’s aim for 15 books published outside this half-decade, and at least 7 from before the year 2000.
6. Read 3+ books of poetry or novels in verse. Again, this shouldn’t be a challenge, given how many books of poetry live in The Burrow.
7. Read more nonfiction — at least 5, rather than the two I managed last year. Usually I squeeze in memoirs, but the only one I began, I think I want to read in print, rather than the audiobook copy I had.
8. Read a book by an author who lives in Africa and one who lives in Central or South America.
9. Send the books I’ve bought as gifts to the people they’re meant for. (Or donate them if the recipient has aged out of them.) Again, this shouldn’t be as hard as it is.
10. Give every book I own a permanent home on a shelf.

So, how about you? What kind of bookish goals do you have for 2025?