Happy New Year! I hope your 2023 reading is off to a good start. As I do every January, I have listed below some reading resolutions for the year ahead. I don’t do very well with numerical targets and goals or anything that restricts my reading choices too much, so these are just some loose plans to help shape my year of reading.

* Finish my Classics Club list. There are only sixteen books left on my list and I’ll be reading at least one of them this month (Wild Strawberries by Angela Thirkell) so I think this is very doable! My deadline for completing the list was actually last November, but I’m not really bothered about that; I would just like to finish the remaining books and have already started to prepare a new list!

* Re-read some old favourites. I say I’m going to do this every year and then hardly ever do it! I used to re-read a lot, but now, with my endless TBR, there always seems to be something else that needs to be read first.

* Resist the temptations of NetGalley. After a lot of hard work I have finally got the number of review copies waiting on my NetGalley shelf down to single figures! NetGalley is a great source of new books, but you can very quickly find yourself requesting more than you can keep up with. While I’m sure I’ll still request some, now that I’m down to a manageable number I want to focus more on books I already own.

* Make some progress with my Reading the Walter Scott Prize project. I did quite well with the 2022 shortlist, reading three out of the four shortlisted titles, as well as some others from the longlist. However, there are still lots of books from previous years’ shortlists that I haven’t read yet, so I’ll try to read some of them this year. I’ve already discovered lots of great new books and authors through this particular prize and am looking forward to discovering more.

* Continue with some of the series and trilogies I’ve started and never finished! There are so many of these I couldn’t even begin to list them all here, but a few I would particularly like to go back to are Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series, Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series, Ellis Peters’ Cadfael mysteries and Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles. There are many, many more!

* Take part in the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge and Read Christie 2023 (although I won’t do the Christie challenge every month as it can become too much). Apart from these two year-long challenges, I will be joining in with any shorter reading events and themed weeks/months that appeal to me.

* My final resolution is the same every year – make every book I read a potential book of the year! That means being more ruthless about abandoning books I’m not enjoying (something I find very difficult) and being more selective about which books to pick up in the first place.

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What about you? Do you have any reading resolutions or plans for 2023?

Happy New Year! I can’t believe it’s 2019 – that means in October my blog will be ten years old! I’m sure I’ll be reflecting on that later in the year and finding some way to mark the occasion. For now though, like many other book bloggers, I wanted to use my first post of the year to look at my reading and blogging plans for the next twelve months.

Challenges and events

I prefer to have as much freedom in my reading choices as possible, so I’m not signing up for any year-long reading challenges this year, with the exception of the Historical Fiction Challenge hosted at Passages to the Past. I read a lot of historical fiction anyway so that one is not really a challenge for me, but I still like to take part as it helps me to connect with other like-minded readers and to keep a list of my historical fiction reads in one place.

I do enjoy participating in shorter events hosted by other bloggers such as 20 Books of Summer, the R.I.P. event and Nonfiction November so I will join in with some of those in 2019. I’ll also keep working through my Classics Club list and participating in any associated Classics Club events.

Blogging plans

The same as last year, really. I will continue with my Commonplace Book posts at the end of every month and my Historical Musings posts in the middle of the month, as well as participating in Six Degrees of Separation and Top Ten Tuesday now and then.

Personal projects

My Walter Scott Prize Project has been neglected recently, so I would like to make some progress on that in 2019. I also want to devote more time to re-reading old favourites – I say that at the beginning of every year and never manage to do it. Sadly, I only re-read one book in 2018, but I’m determined to improve on that number in 2019 so have started off my year’s reading with a re-read of Cashelmara by Susan Howatch. I also want to make progress with some of the series I’m in the middle of reading and find time for some of those long-anticipated books I’ve been putting off reading for years because I wanted to have ‘something to look forward to’.

Most of all, I just want to enjoy the books I read in 2019.

What plans do you have for the year ahead?