2019 Goals

Happy (almost) New Year, friends!

I know I said it in almost every single wrap-up/TBR post this year, but I literally can’t believe how quickly this year flew and now its New Years Eve?! I’ve had such a great year this year and can’t wait to see what 2019 is going to bring. One of my favourite things to do to bring in the New Year is share my goals with you all in an effort to feel somewhat prepared for the coming year.

As 2018 was my first proper year of blogging, I thought it would be cool to see how I did with my 2018 goals before sharing my goals for 2019!

2019 Reading Challenges

This year I took part in my first proper reading challenges, Beat the Backlist and the Goodreads Challenge, with varying success. Although I absolutely smashed my Goodreads Challenge, I struggled to balance backlist books with new releases and ARCS as well as log my reading progress with the BtB database to register points. However, I had a lot of fun with reading challenges and found that they (mostly) helped me keep on track with my reading!

For 2019, I’m committing myself to even more reading challenges and am super excited to take part. I’ve matched my challenges up to my reading goals, which I’ll be sharing with you all on New Years Eve, but for today I’m sharing with you all which challenges I’ll be taking part in and 8 books I will read for each as well as linking you up to the hosts so you can sign up too if you want! A massive thanks to the wonderful Tina for her 2019 Reading Challenge Index which helped me find some new challenges to take part in.

2018 in Review | The Best Books of 2018

2018 has been an absolutely incredible year here at Red Rocket Panda. Although I technically set up my blog in April 2017, I didn’t start properly blogging until January 2018 and I cannot believe how much this blog has grown – I’ve made some fantastic friends, read a tonne of brilliant books, and enjoyed bringing you all content throughout the year.

One of the things that surprised me the most is that I managed to not only smash my original reading goal of reading 50 books this year, but I also smashed my second goal of 75. As of today, I have read 81 books which is 55 books more than last year. I wanted to share with you all some of my favourite books as well as new-to-me authors that I’ve read and discovered this year!

2018 in Review| 2018 Friendships

Earlier in the month, Lauren did an amazingly heart-warming post for her first day as host for Bookending Winter called ‘Warming your winter’ where she looked back at her blogging friendships during 2018 and shared their posts. I was honestly so touched when I read through Lauren’s post and saw my name mentioned in it, it really did warm my winter. 

I really wanted to do my own post so I could spread the love to my own lovely blogging friends who have seriously made this year incredible. I never thought that I would make such amazing friends through blogging and I’m so grateful to all of you for making this year so incredible. 

Goodreads Choice Awards 2018 Winners

Every year I look forward to the Goodreads Choice Awards and this year was no different. Even long before I started book blogging, the GR Choice Awards provided the perfect opportunity to show my love for my favourite books and (of course) increase my TBR by adding some of the biggest book names of the year.