I thought seeing as we’re coming to the end of another year filled with books, it was time to talk about something that we haven’t gone into detail about yet…how much we read.

Last year it was one of our goals to spend less time reading, which might sound crazy coming from two people whose whole lives are ALL about books. But we had good reason! We wanted to try and make writing more of a priority…except this didn’t really work out. We’re treating you to loads of stats this Blogmas, so here’s the breakdown of how many books we’ve read per year since starting a GoodReads account.

           |      BEE      |    MADDIE
2013 |       63        |         53
2014 |      143       |        139
2015 |      178       |        187
2016 |      231       |        240

We each somehow managed to read 60 more books in 2016 than 2015. Now that’s partly due to the ridiculously long summers you get at university, but most it’s because we procrastinated all other hobbies including writing. At the beginning of 2017 I really though we’d each read 300 books in a year, but looking back that’s absolutely crazy! Where would we have had to go from there? Finishing a book everyday? That’s just impractical.

It’s obvious that our plan to read less in 2016 didn’t work out, so when it came to making our resolutions for 2017, we decided to try again. And this year it’s worked. We’ve still read an awful lot, but the point it, it’s not as much as last year. At the end of 2016 we realised we didn’t feel as successful as we thought having read over 200 books, and that’s because we’d let ourselves down in other areas. So, even though I’ve read less his year (not by much, admittedly) I feel so much better for it, because unlike last year we actually finished the first draft of our co-written novel, which definitely wouldn’t have been possible if we’d tried to push for more reading.

Next year looks like it’s going to be even busier for us writing wise, so when it comes to setting my GoodReads goal, I think I’ll be aiming for 150. Hopefully, this will also force us to be a lot more selective when it comes to what we’re reading. We’ll talk more about the benefits of DNF’ing (something we started doing in 2017) at some point in the future, but already its lead to us enjoying a higher percentage of what we read, since in 2016, I’m pretty sure I gave majority 2.5 star ratings, and I’d much rather be finding more 4/5 star books instead.

This year we definitely had the realisation that it’s not how much  you read, but what you’re reading. We’d 100% recommend in 2018, letting go of the pressure to read lots of books, you might just find yourself reading more anyway.