Sunday, January 10, 2016

Reading and reviewing goals

I've been really bad about posting non-review stuff on Booklikes but not here. A large part of it is that social interaction is so much easier on Booklikes. I know I have a few readers here, but most of my commenters/visitors seem to be temporary first-time visitors who stumbled over here via Google or a link somewhere.

Anyway, one of the things I posted about on Booklikes was my reading and reviewing goals for the year. I'm not calling them resolutions, because for some reason that feels more intimidating and set in stone than "goals." I've already gotten a start on a few of them. Here they are:
  • Be more organized. This particular goal involves taking greater advantage of LibraryThing. One of the things I've spent the past few days doing is cataloging my entire paper book collection.* During LibraryThing's holiday sale, I broke down and bought a CueCat, which I have so far used to scan over 970 books. During that process, I identified 15 unintentional duplicate purchases and 7 books I'd already reviewed (usually because it was easier to just get the book from the library than to figure out where I'd put my personal copy). I still have a little bit more work to do, but I'm done with the most important stuff - I now have a catalog I can search when I'm trying to remember whether I already own, say, volume 20 of a particular manga series.
  • Use LibraryThing to keep track of my movie/TV watching. I've already started doing this. It'll be nice to have a backup of my movie and TV reviews, and I'm hoping that it will make my end-of-year "best" and "worst" lists easier to compile.
  • Use LibraryThing to keep track of my acquisition and offloading of physical items (books, DVDs). I've already started doing this too. I kept paper lists of both in 2015, but I got tired of writing stuff down and began slacking off after a few months. Here's hoping I do a better job this time around.
  • Read 143 works. I base my Booklikes Reading Challenge on what I managed to finish in the previous year (rereads count too), so that puts me at 143 for 2016. It was very hard to reach my goal of 142 last year, so we'll see how this year goes. 

* - I had a twinge of privacy concerns about doing this. It was one of the reasons I hadn't done it up until now. However, since I add all my new e-book purchases and generally try pretty hard to review everything I read and watch, I figure I gave up on book collection privacy a long time ago.

2 comments:

  1. Here's hoping you have a great 2016...those are lofty goals, especially that books-read count. Good luck.

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    1. Reading 143 works sounds impressive, except manga volumes and e-book short stories count. The only reason I accomplished last year's goal of 142 was because I spent all of December reading the shortest e-short stories I owned.

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