Sarah's reading goals for 2025

And no, there are no big number goals here!

We’re finally beginning to crawl out of our resting mode and coming back to all things RTL (naturally, we’ve been reading the whole time - I’ve finished 6 books so far this year and none of them have been 5 stars… HELP!) But, as we get back to regular content here, I wanted to first share what my goals are in terms of reading in 2025.

First and foremost, I didn’t set a goal number of books last year and I don’t plan to set one this year. I ended up with 157 books read in 2024 which is just slightly higher than 2023, and that number felt good to me. So whether I hit that again, or I end up with 100, or 200, it truly does not matter to me.

What does matter to me, are these goals:

Get through my physical books

I’ve talked about how I’ve finally accepted the fact that I much prefer reading on my Kindle, though buying pretty books for my shelves is definitely still a thing. I have 28 physical books on my TBR shelves. (See picture above - all 3 bottom shelves are my unread TBR.) I’ve already gone through and requested them all at my library, or looked for other places where I can read them for free on my Kindle. And if I can’t, then I’m going to suck it up and read them physically.

It’s only 28 books, I can get through those easily in one year. So that’s going to be a huge focus for me. I know I’ll end up buying a few more physical books here and there but I’d really like to either read or sell what I already own. Plus, I’ve already started buying new books that I really want to read on Kindle, and my library holds are maxed out. This should be a pretty easy goal to achieve.

Re-read six favorite books

I know re-reading isn’t for everyone but honestly, I love it. In 2023 I picked 12 books I wanted to re-read and read one each month of the year. It was so fun to revisit some of my favorites. I didn’t want to do quite that many this year so instead I picked just six that I want to get through.

I plan to re-read:

• Shark Heart by Emily Habeck - my favorite book of 2023!

• This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub - I remember flying through this one and hugging it at the end.

• The Measure by Nikki Erlick - she finally has a new book coming out this year so I want to re-read this one and remember how clever she is.

• Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin - surprised to see this here? Podcast listeners will know that I took major issues with the writing of this one but liked the story overall. I want to try it again, knowing what I know about the writing, and see if it changes my overall opinion.

• The Midnight Library by Matt Haig - similar to Tomorrow x3, I liked this book but didn’t love it. But, I’m a different reader now than I was then, so I want to give it another shot.

• The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton - one of my favorite cli-fi reads ever, I can’t wait to revisit this one.

Only request books I’m interested in

Like many people when they first join Netgalley, I went a little nuts requesting books just because they were free! I finally got through what I had and have improved my feedback ratio. But what I was learning was that the books I was choosing at random were just not working for me. So I plan to be more discerning with what I choose, making sure they’re books I actually want to read to make things a little more fair to the author, and to the other books on my shelves waiting to be read.

And this is a blanket goal for all my reading - as you saw at the top of this post, I’ve read 6 books so far this year and none of them have been all that great (with one outlier). I need to get better at choosing books for myself. I know what I like but FOMO so often gets the best of me!

Work on my book reviews

As someone who talks about books publicly, having to talk coherently about something I just read (and then likely forgot all about) is really hard. But I’ve been trying to make my reviews not only more succinct but also more about the way the books made me feel rather than just rehashing what happened. The star rating system is only so helpful and I’ve been having a harder and harder time with that system in the past year or so. So my pledge to you is to make it easier for you to understand if you’ll like a book through my review.

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And that’s it! Nothing extremely big here, but just a few things I’ll quietly be working on behind the scenes that you’ll see play out in our content here at RTL. I’d love to know some of your 2025 reading goals in the comments. Maybe I can steal them for myself :) Happy reading, book nerds!