At the beginning of 2020, I set a pretty reasonable list of goals for my reading throughout the year. I don’t always remember and/or follow up with my yearly reading goals, but this time I did make it more of a point to focus on them, so let’s see how I did!

Read this stack of my top 10 books to read in 2020: I always do really terribly at this goal, UNTIL 2020! (In past years, I think I’ve read an average of 3 out of the 10. Eek.) This year, I actually did it–I read all 10 of my top 10 TBR for the year. (Well, technically, I did DNF one of them, but still.)

Out of my top 10 TBR for the year, 6 out of 10 were 5-star reads!

One was one of my least favorite/most disappointing books of the year!

Two were good but not amazing and had some structural issues!

I think what I can glean from this is that I’m fairly good at predicting books that will end up becoming 5-star reads (6/10 is not bad!) and that even though I’m a mood-reader, it is worthwhile to force myself to stick to reading goals sometimes for that reason.

Read more than 9 five-star reads – Historically, I have this strange trend where I tend to only read 8 or 9 five-star reads over the course of a year. In 2020, I did accomplish this goal, by reading 10 new-to-me 5-star reads, as well as a few 5-star re-reads.

Focus on backlist books: I did this! I did end up reading more 2020 releases than originally planned, but I also kept up with backlist titles throughout the year, including reading several that have been sitting on my TBR shelf for several years (most of which were also on my top 10 TBR for 2020):

Read some books on writing: I did not do this. I actually totally forgot that this was a goal for the year; it would be a good one to carry over into 2021.

Re-reads: I’d initially wanted to re-read these 4 books in 2020 in anticipation of reading their sequels:

And I ended up reading 2 out of the 4: Carry On (and then reading its sequel Wayward Son) and Sapphire Flames (and its sequel Emerald Blaze). I didn’t re-read The Handmaid’s Tale because I was intentionally avoiding any dystopian and/or post-apocalyptic reads in 2020 (for obvious reasons) and I think that’ll continue for the forseeable future. I didn’t re-read Gideon the Ninth because I realized that I actually remembered it really vividly, and then ran out of time to read its sequel before the end of the year. I still do plan to read Harrow the Ninth in 2021!