Wow. The year has flown by and I am struggling to remember what’s happened over the last twelve months. All I know is that is has been a wild ride. From PhD application to Spooktober daily posts, 2024 has been a busy year but it has been so incredibly fun and rewarding too. I want to take this moment to thank everyone for reading these posts I make, for taking time out of your day to see what I’ve written. It really means a lot. I intend to create posts that are engaging and informative for you, and in 2025 I will be leaning into that further as I bring bookish social media into the discussion posts more often. Enough about that though, let’s see some reading statistics!

In 2024, I read 91 books, DNFed 9, and am currently reading 1 book. I am really happy with those numbers, especially considering the timeline breakdown. Between January and June, I read 19 books. That means I read the other 72 books between July and December, across roughly the same amount of time. This goes to show how personal circumstances and workload can completely alter your motivations to read. In January, we got a kitten, and with a two month adjustment period before he was allowed to start roaming outside, that meant two months of a fluffball wanting attention and not wanting me to read. Then came the PhD application process and the work I had to put in for a brief literature review and proposal write up. It was intense, with a rejection jump scare thrown in for good measure, so my emotional bandwidth and free time were short, contributing to fewer books read. Then the acceptance letter came and my mood drastically improved, and with it my reading motivation.

What about my goals for 2024?

I set out three goals at the beginning of 2024: no book target, diversifying my reading, and reading more New Zealand books. I also wnated to read my entire physical TBR by the end of 2024. I can wholeheartedly say that I had a decent crack at them all. I used a Notion template to track my reading which didn’t show the total number during the process. I found this to be a brilliant way to list what I had read, the details and rating, and then move on. Of my 91 books read, 13 were kiwi books (NZ setting, NZ author or NZ voices), and I have about the same number of NZ books out from the library for a February project. As for diversifying my reads, well, I think its easily summed up with this – I have read Adult Fantasy, YA Fantasy, Crime Fiction, Dark Academia, Light Academia, Historical Fiction, Historical Romance, Historical Fiction Murder Mystery, Thriller, Horror, Romance, YA Sci-Fi, Adult Sci-Fi, Literary Fiction, Contemporary Fiction, NZ Fiction, Poetry, Short Stories, Foreign Literature (translated into English), Non-Fiction, and Manga. I don’t think it gets much more diverse than that. I have made great progress with my physical TBR, but there are still a few series to complete and some new additions to my shelf to get through.

So what’s in the cards for 2025?

Over January and February, I will be increasing my posting schedule to four posts a week in January and five posts in February. This is to get the physical TBRs read so I can move onto new series and more library books. This is also in anticipation for Aotearoa New Zealand Book Month in February. If you were reading my posts since February 2024, you may remember I mentioned the Aotearoa New Zealand Readathon. I am hoping it will happen again in 2025, and I plan to show you all the diversity within New Zealand Literature and why reading New Zealand books, or any local and national literature, is incredibly important. My February posts will be like Spooktober with reviews and discussions on the weekend, but I get to have breaks during the week.

Following Aotearoa New Zealand Book Month, I will resume my regular three-posts-a-week schedule. I’m really looking forward to it, and I hope you see a few reads that spark your interest. Once again, thank you for reading my posts. I look forward to sharing more with you in 2025!