I have to say, 2024 sounds a little too serious as a year, doesn’t it? Even in 2023 it felt like we were still in the shadow of 2020, but now it feels a lot more apparent that we’re entering the mid-2020s, which is discomforting. I know this is all subjective, but the march of time has never felt more apparent to me.

Neverminding that digression, with the dramatic change of my working habits and schedule introduced a couple of years ago, it took me a while to adjust my reading habits to a place I could be happy with. As a result, I referred to my reading endeavours in 2022 in last year’s equivalent of this post as a “dud”. I’m happy to report now that I managed to turn that mood around in a year’s time. Let’s have a look at the particulars.

Goodreads Challenge

I reined things in a lot more last year to make my goals feel more attainable, which actually worked out really well. I chose a modest 35 books to read for my Goodreads challenge in 2023, and by the end I successfully completed 45 books. A whopping 29 of these books were comics/graphic novels, 14 were books, 1 was a book of poetry, and 1 more was an art book.

Now, this is actually only 1 more book than I read in 2022, but I’m happy with these results overall anyway, especially with what I managed to accomplish with reading comics. Last year I expressed disappointment with how much I’d like reading comics slide, and while I didn’t exactly read a great variety of comics in 2023, I did read a good quantity of them.

This year, I set my challenged to 40 books to keep things more modest. I still frequently have editing work to do, which also impacts my desire to read at times, so I don’t want to overestimate myself going forward. Still, I’m hoping I can keep some momentum going since a change in my work schedule part way through last year resulted in me gaining significant bursts of reading time.

Reading Goals from 2023

Last year I decided I didn’t want to rigidly lay out what books I ought to get to, even foregoing my scrappy to-read list and quarterly updates on my progress; overall, I think this was the right decision. I was a lot happier following my whims more, and I actually ended up accomplishing a number of goals that I picked up throughout the year.

For example, from a random purchase while waiting at a book store one day, I decided to read Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and The Lost World, coincidentally during the 30th anniversary year of the release of the film adaptation, which I completed successfully. The first I had read before, while the other was new, and I’m really happy I managed to get to them both so close together.

In terms of comic book series, I successfully completed reading through Paper Girls by Brian K. Vaughn and Cliff Chiang, I fully caught up on Berserk by Kentaro Miura, and I read through all of the manga adaptation of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess by Akira Himekawa. With the first two, it was great to get on top of two series that I had owned half of for a number of years and had been in the middle of reading for ages, respectively. As for Twilight Princess, I noticed they were available at my local library and successfully borrowed all but the final volume from there, which also bolstered my new-found desire to read more library books.

As for novels, I finally read American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, which had lived unread on my shelf since I was 19. It was a pretty unpleasant reading experience in a lot of ways, but I’m glad I got it done finally. I also successfully completed two Discworld novels in 2023, which is lower than some of my better years but I’m still happy with.

Reading Plans Going into 2024

As with last year, I want to follow my whims more, so I’m not going to outline too much right now. What I will commit to are the next two Discworld books that I need to read, The Truth and Thief of Time, and my sudden decision yesterday to finally start the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer with Annihilation; I’ve owned the entire trilogy for years now, so it’s good to finally get the ball rolling on these.

No concrete plans with comics yet, but I’m sure I’ll decide upon something. There are other series I would like to put effort into continuing too, but we’ll see how that goes.

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What are your reading plans for 2024? I’d love to hear about them.

Thank you for reading!