Do you have a reading resolution for 2018? This is a nice time of year to reflect on your reading life and set goals. Are you reading as much as you’d like to? Are you reading the kinds of books you want to be?

For the past two years I’ve participated in the Goodreads Reading Challenge to help me track a reading goal for the year. You can set the number of books you’d like to read in 2018. Then when you finish a book, enter it in Goodreads and it will track it for you. I’ve found that doing the math and deciding how many books I want to read per week and then seeing what that means for an overall year goal is helpful.

For 2017 my goal was to read 53 books, one more than the 52 I had tracked in 2016. With a baby on the way, I didn’t want to add too many more books. However, I was hoping that monitoring my reading would help me maintain this beloved part of my life, which is also a crucial part of my job as a librarian. This goal amounted to roughly a book a week. Happily I’ve still been able to carve out that precious time to read and actually made it to 60 books. Hooray! Goodreads tallies your books up for you and keeps a record of each challenge you’ve completed:

For 2018, I’m sticking with the same strategy and just upping my reading goal by 1 book. So my reading challenge is to read 61 books this year. I know I can reach that if I’m reading some amount every day. And since inhabiting the world of a book is my favorite thing to do, I’d say that’s good to be striving for in order to have a happy 2018.

Your goal could be to read 12 books this year (a book every month) or 26 (1 every two weeks), whatever you want your reading life to be. I think Goodreads is a helpful tool for this, but you don’t need it. Set aside a notebook and write down your goal and the title of each book you read. Simple!

What will your reading resolution be this year?