What are your 2025 reading plans and goals?
Plus, my Year of Dickens and a few ideas for you.
Hello, readers!
Numbers-based reading goals aren’t in vogue right now, but I actually think they can be really helpful to get someone into, or back into, the habit of reading. After a few years of hitting a numbers goal, you’ll probably have a good routine established and can explore other ideas. (I list a few of those ideas below.)
For many years my goal was to read 100 books. After I did that a handful of years in a row, I no longer needed to have a numbers goal simply because reading became so ingrained into my daily life. It left me room to focus on bigger projects like reading a biography of every president and reading every Pulitzer winner.
In 2025, I’ll keep plugging away at the Pulitzers. I view that as more of a lifetime goal, however, which sort of happens in the background of my reading life.
My primary 2025 goal is called the Year of Dickens: I’m going to do my best to get through all of Charles Dickens’s major works. He has 14 complete novels, one unfinished novel (Edwin Drood), and a few novellas/sketches (Christmas stories, Sketches by Boz) that are on my list. As a raw number, it’s not that many books. But the books are long, the pages are often dense, and the reading is always slower when dealing with ~175-year-old books. I haven’t had a one-year goal or project in a while, so I’m quite looking forward to the challenge.
I’d love to hear your own reading plans and goals for 2025!
If you’d like to have more of a plan but are having a hard time coming up with one, here are a few ideas that go beyond raw numbers:
Focus on a single author’s catalog of books. Take a year to really dive into one of your favorite authors. You don’t have to commit to reading everything they’ve written, but explore their major titles and maybe even a biography or two (if they’re not a modern author).
Get local. Do some research on the novels and non-fiction titles set in your city, state, or region — and then read those books. There’s nothing like reading for fostering a deeper connection to the place you live.
Pick a time period and jump in. Are enamored with a certain time period in history? Go all in with books published during that era as well as books about that era.
Pick a prize list you’re fond of. Prizes aren’t everything, but they are almost always interesting. Prize-winning books show reader what critics and culture at large found interesting and important in that moment. Whether it’s a big prize (Pulitzers, National Book Awards, Bookers) or something more genre-specific (Edgars, Nebulas, etc.), prize lists are a fun way to explore books both new and old.
As with 2024, the plan for next year is no plan. I'm very satisfied with how well it worked out this year! The next right thing to read always presents itself, and I have a menu of backup options I choose from when I don't otherwise have an idea at hand. I've learned that any sort of "to read" list I make for myself turns reading into a chore to "get through", rather than a joy in itself.
My tentative goal is to 1 - read the books I already own (there are many), then 2 - read the books I can easily get from the local library (there are some), and to NOT PURCHASE other books I hear about, and suddenly desperately want to read, until 1 & 2 have been completed!