Best Books of 2019

2019 was an interesting year for me in terms of books and reading. I completely smashed my Goodreads Challenge goal in 2018, reading 31 books over my goal and 55 books more than I did in 2017. Although on the surface that looks fantastic (which it was!) it was also a little misleading as 2018 was the only year where I wasn’t in education, with the exception of the last few months of the year when I started my Masters in September, which meant I had a lot more time for reading! At the beginning of 2019, I naively set my Goodreads Challenge goal at 75 books and managed to read 51 books due to a combination of academia, depression and reading slumps. Not too bad overall but I’ve definitely learned my lesson about setting unrealistic goals haha.

Although I didn’t read as many books as I had wanted to, I did read a lot of great books – books that I thoroughly enjoyed and books that I fell in love with. Ultimately that is more important to me than how many books I ended up reading – I would rather enjoy my books than reading loads of books I end up not liking. Whilst I enjoyed almost all of the books I read in 2019, I’ve picked out 10 books that really stand out to me as the ones I loved the most which have made my best books of 2019 list.

2019 Goals| Quarterly Check-In #1

Don’t even get me started on how the hell it’s even April already. I feel like I only wrote my 2019 goals post a few weeks ago and yet, here we are – a quarter of the way through the year in the blink of an eye. As one of my goals for this year was to introduce a quarterly a check-in, in order to keep myself accountable and share my progress with you all, I thought I’d kick April off by reviewing where I’m up to with my goals.

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.