I joined Goodreads in 2010, shortly after giving birth to my fourth child. I thought it was a cool site and rated a bunch of books I had read in the past, but I was rarely reading those days because four kids under the age of six is enough to handle. Then I started blogging for money that same year, leaving me even less time to read. It wasn’t until 2012 that I started using the site, but only sporadically, and 2013 was the first time I signed up for the Reading Challenge and just barely made my goal because I kept forgetting to mark my books on the site. 2014 I was finally hooked into using the site to document my reads, but it wasn’t until 2020 that I decided if I was reading all these books, I better write a review for them. That and my determination to re-read the Nancy Drew books led to the creation of this blog.

Here’s a look at my reading challenges over the years:

As you can see, once I embraced using the site in 2014, I crushed all the reading challenges. For the highest years, I was reading through many children’s middle grade books like Newbery Winners and Honor books, or the entire Little House on the Prairie series, including the sequels and prequels that were published after her death. One year I read every children’s Christmas book we had, and we have a lot! So naturally, reading over 300 books in one year had a lot to do about that. Which is why I concentrate on pages read, but still that’s not a perfect system.

On average, I’m reading 40–50,000 pages a year, which I think is fine. Although the one problem with that is Nancy Drew books. As any reader of my Nancy Drew posts knows, there are two versions of the first 34 titles, but Goodreads doesn’t separate them into Original Text and Revised Text, so they only count for one book, when really I’ve read two. So I only get credit for approximately 180 pages, when the Original Text is an additional 225. Still, 40–50,000 pages in one year is fairly impressive.

My goal for this year is to read 100 books, and I’ve already completed one. I don’t mark books as read until I review them on the blog, so there are several books I read in 2020 that will count towards my 2021 goal. It’s an imperfect system, but it’s the one I’ve got.

Do you use Goodreads? Do you participate in the Reading Challenges? What are your reading goals for the year?