First off, Happy New Year everyone! I hope everyone had a wonderful and safe time ringing in the new year.

A new year means it is time to look back on the reading goals I set for last year. I wasn’t blogging yet, so there’s no post to refer back to, but I set a goal of reading 58 books, after Michael from Books on the Nightstand started an 11 more in 2011 challenge.

Sadly I didn’t reach my goal. I only read 51 books this year. So I did read books than last year. I was looking at Goodreads stat tool that they have for tracking your books read from you read shelf, if you put the date that you read the book when you save it, the Goodreads stats tool will keep track of it. I noticed that you can also see how many pages you read in each year. This year I read 17,670 pages, versus 14,168 last year. So I think all in all, at least I definitely read more this year.

So what goals do I want to set for the new year? Well I’m participating in some reading challenges for the first time. I’m doing the TBR Pile Challenge hosted by RoofBeamReader and BethFishRead’s What’s in a Name Challenge. You should be able to find icons on the left of the blog that will take you to the blogs and challenge posts. In addition to this, I think I want to set a goal of 55 books read this year. It would be great if I read more, but at least this way it seems easily attainable, as it’s only 4 more books than this year, and I won’t feel overwhelmed about it. Goodreads has their reading challenge tracker again this year, so you can enter in your goal and it will keep track and tell you if you are behind or ahead of reaching your goal.

So in case you can’t tell, I’m a big fan of GoodReads (http://www.goodreads.com) If you haven’t checked it out yet, go do it. It’s a great way to keep track of what you’ve read, what you’re reading, and what you want to read. You can also find reviews of books, book groups, and friends so you can exchange thoughts on books and find new books to read. As if you guys needed help adding to your to be read pile 😉

I hope everyone is recovering from their New Year’s Eve parties and maybe can spend a relaxing day home curled up with a book. Happy Reading!