Mia's reading goals for 2025

My reading life is always a work in progress!

Look at all the pretty books I saw at Target recently! 😍

Like Sarah mentioned in her reading goals post, it’s a new year and we’ve been slowly recovering from the holidays and thinking about our reading lives for 2025. I’ve been reading much more slowly than I normally would at this time in previous years. But I was sick and then I was busy and then I just couldn’t decide what to read. Nothing has really sounded good, maybe I’m in a funk. Hopefully, that will change as I strive toward my own reading goals that I want to share with you today.

Read at least 100 books

I’ve been a Goodreads challenge girl for years and this year is no different. I set a goal to read 100 books and that works out to a little less than 2 books a week. That is very manageable, seeing as last year my goal was also to read 100 books and I finished 124. Not too shabby. But please know that even if I don’t achieve this goal, it’s really not a big deal to me. I set these number goals for fun and there’s never any shame involved if I don’t make it because who cares!

Exhibit A: I’m already behind on my challenge. 🤷‍♀️

Stop downloading books from NetGalley

I love NetGalley, I really do. I think it’s an excellent resource for readers and publishers alike and I’m not knocking it in any way. It’s me, I’m the problem. I go on these “read now” sprees and download a bunch of books that sound interesting and then I can’t keep up and read them in a timely enough manner. So I’m going to finish everything that’s on my NetGalley shelf (eek, it’s kind of a lot) and give feedback and then take a break from it this year. It’s going to feel weird, but it’s for the best. I don’t need all that pressure in my life to read by a certain deadline and it’s also not fair to the authors + publishers who rely on NG feedback to get hype for their books.

But I refuse to give up my Goodreads giveaways because it’s like winning the bookish lottery every time I win a free book.

Read as many of the physical books I own as I can

If you’re new here, I live in an RV with my family and we have limited storage space. As such, I try to only read ebooks or audiobooks because they don’t take up any room. But like many of you bookworms, I can’t resist the siren call of pretty, shiny physical books and I have too many of them hoarded away in the bottom of my closet. I need to read them and then donate them and free up that shelf for other items, like maybe my overflowing gym clothes collection.

A few of the titles I plan to tackle soon:

• We Lived on the Horizon by Erika Swyler

• Summer of Night by Dan Simmons

• By Any Other Name by Jodi Picoult

• Wordhunter by Stella Sands

• Little Great Island by Kate Woodworth

Continue leaning into the genres that light me up

I like to think of myself as someone who reads pretty widely across genres and you could definitely call me an eclectic reader. I tend to shy away from hyped books and read more backlist titles or debut titles from brand new authors or little known titles that I think deserve more love. But looking back at some of my top ten book lists from previous years, I’ve found that there are a few genres that really bring me joy and I plan to focus a lot of my reading efforts in these areas:

• True crime

• Memoir

• Christian nonfiction

• Horror

• Science Fiction (mostly of the climate fiction and dystopian fiction variety)

• Toxic romance (don’t judge me, I love a bad boy MMC who just doesn’t GAF)

• Classics

• Literary fiction that destroys me

• Anything “weird” (yes, I know weird is subjective, but weird like when you read the synopsis, you think “WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?!”)

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There you have it, my reading goals for 2025. I love the fresh slate of a new year and the promise of all the reading that is to come.

Also, Sarah mentioned in her goals post that she wanted to work on her book reviews and I’m curious to know what you look for in your book reviews. Tell us all about it in the comments and happy reading!