This question is inspired by a disagreement I had with my kid this morning. I have set myself a yearly reading goal each year for well over a decade. For the first time in a long time, I’m going to struggle to hit this year’s goal, but I’m sure I will get there. My kid doesn’t set a reading goal for the year, and I couldn’t properly articulate why I do, or why it’s important to me. I do like reading a lot of books, and I do like having a bit of pressure to do that - but not enough to make reading feel like a chore or unenjoyable. Which has led me to wonder:

Why do you set a yearly reading goal? (Or not set a reading goal?)

I'm curious to hear your thoughts, what are the books that everyone read and seem to love and when you started it - it turned out to be something totally not for you? or you just don't understand the appeal of it? or the other way around - what are the books you love despite other people not liking it? for me it's Babel by R.F.Kuang - everyone seems to love it, and as a linguist, i thought this book will be one of my favourites, but i dnf'ed it after around 1/5 it was just so bad, I didn't care about one thing happening there 😭😭😭

I sometimes find myself stuck in a spot of "well I can't watch the movie/tv show before reading the book" then I find I am falling behind and put off watching the adaptation until well after the hype as died down. For example, I still haven't watched the new Frankenstein movie because I absolutely must read the book even thought it's a story I know well.

It's funny little rule I set and I laugh at myself a lot about it since it's of course all self-imposed! Does anyone else create these little barriers? Or perhaps people prefer to read the book after watching the adaptation?

I was reflecting that I’ve read a lot more books than usual this year - almost double my usual amount! When I thought about why, I realised it’s mostly because my library took away the charge for ordering in books they don’t have in stock. So I have a constant stack of reserves and it makes me so happy! 🧚

I then had such a nice thought of all you lovely Pagebound folks tootling off to your respective libraries / browsing the charity shops / racking up a huge pile of TBRs from your fave book shop / scrolling your e-reader for new treasure. It made me want to know where you get your books from! What’s your routine, what about it brings you joy? ✨

I have been looking through book reviews every now and then and I see a mostly positive review with no star ratings?? does this affect the books rating or is it just ignored if at 0 stars because why would people want to tank the ratings even if they didn’t want to give a definitive star rating?