Goals and Plans and Junk!

I'm good at titles!

It's the end of the year so I thought I'd ramble a little at you all. I'm feeling a bit retrospective, I guess.

It's been a little over 2 years since I came back from the hiatus I accidentally took because of reasons we don't need to go into. I've definitely slowed down when it comes to blogging, but I'm proud to say that in both 2014 and 2015, I blogged at least once a month every month. In 2015, I blogged more than 2014, and I'm proud of that, too.

Beyond strict quantity, I think the quality of my reviews has very much improved. Or, maybe, I'm just too chatty, but I think they're gotten much more thorough, detailed, and socially aware. Looking through my reviews, I like seeing the wide variety of books I've been reading the last few years, even the posts about old, probably-no-one-cares books. I've been really enjoying the posts I've been writing lately. I had a lot of fun doing the Friday Cuteness posts, although finding content for them is harder than you'd think!

I'm not entirely sure what will happen in 2016. There's been a lot of changes in my life, and I'm not sure what happens now. Honestly, thinking about the future makes me kind of have a panic attack, so I'm only going to try to think about things in my control. I don't make resolutions, but I do have a few blogging goals. I want to continue blogging once a month, but I think I'd like to aim for two posts a month. I would really like to do one review, and one "Things I've Read Recently" post a month, since I enjoy the low-pressure of those.

A not-really-a-goal thing (I guess this is the junk!) that I've been doing lately is trying to read more of books I own, and decide which ones I really want and which ones I could get rid of without minding so much. Part of this that I'm not sure I mentioned is that we moved in September from a 3 bedroom house to a 2 bedroom apartment. Since my spare room was my library, I have a little less space now! I mentioned this a bit, I think, back when I was thinking about how much it would suck to move all the books I owned, but that's all happened now.

Now it's just on-going decluttering, but I think it makes for some interesting blog posts at least! This one, this one, and this one are all posts inspired by that idea, and I think it's been fun!

Onto the reading front! For the last couple years, I've used Goodreads' reading challenge feature. 5 years, actually. In 2011, I failed because I didn't understand how the "read" function worked (hey, don't look at me like that, I was new to Goodreads). 2012, I set a sarcastic goal and that was kind of a bad year in general. 5000 is the highest they'll let you set, FYI. 2013, I didn't set a goal at all, and in 2014, I set a goal of 50 books and squeaked in the last few books on the last couple days by a breath.

This year, I again set a goal of 50 books, but this year I hit it early, so I added 5 more books twice. I've hit 61 and I may read another book tonight depending on what I feel like doing. You can see my year in books here, which is fun. In 2016, I think I'll make my goal 50 again, since I've managed to do that 2 years in a row. That's a lot of numbers, so how about we all go look at the pretty pictures on that Goodreads thing?

I'm rambling now, but I think I've managed to cover everything. I have no idea where 2016 takes me, or this blog, but I'm hoping for good places, and at least blogging-wise, 2015 was okay. So, talk to me, peeps. How was your year and what are your goals or plans or dreams for 2016? ("Nothing," is an okay answer.)

See you next year!

Peace and cookies,
Laina