Welcome back to Book Break and happy new year!
It's now officially the time when you need to have decided if you're going to making
any New Year's Resolutions.
And I always love doing New Year's Resolutions that are about taking up new habits rather
than quitting things.
I just find that to be more positive.
And obviously I think the most positive thing that you can bring to your life in the New
Year is more reading.
So in this video I have come up with nine different suggestions for New Year's resolutions
you can do that are all about reading more, or reading more widely, or basically just
finding even more ways that reading can bring more joy into your life.
So my first suggestion, I've seen quite a few people do actually, is that you could
create a TBR jar.
So so many of us do the same problem where we just keep buying more and more new books,
and then not actually going back and reading all of the hoards of books we've got stacked
on our shelves.
So, creating a TBR jar is a really good way to address that.
So your New Year's Resolution might be that on 1st January, look at all the books you
currently own, write down all the titles onto scraps of paper, and put them into a jar.
And then when it's time to pick your next book to read, instead of going to the shop,
you have to go to the jar and pull out a title.
So, on 1st January I'm going to be reading...
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, I have been meaning to read that for ages so
very good.
Or, a slight variation on this is that you could set yourself different challenges.
So write down many twelve different challenges and put them into a jar and then every month
pull out what your theme that month reading is going to be.
So it might be that in January I am only reading books by women,
and then the next month maybe I would only read books by writers of colour.
You could have only reading books that came out in the last century,
or books by a writer from a different country to where you live,
there's so many different challenges you could make up like that.
Or maybe you want to shake up the genres that you read, so one of my colleagues, her New
Year's Resolution last year was that all of her books she was going to alternate reading
fiction with nonfiction.
So you could try that, she said she discovered so many new books she otherwise wouldn't have
picked up.
Or maybe you could alternate YA books with adult, or novels with short stories, whatever
kind of pushes you out of your comfort zone.
And again, that's something that you could use a TBR jar for,
so you might pull out every time that your next book is going to be a thriller, or a
historical fiction, and so on.
Or, if you don't want to do the TBR jar idea, there is a different way you could do this
which is with dice.
So for that, you could make it that every number on the dice is a different genre, or
maybe you might have a number for audiobooks, or one number for plays.
You could make it that rolling a double six means you get a free choice.
Now if you don't want to use all the props, a really simple New Year's Resolution could
be to just set a target for the number of books you want to read.
And using the website Goodreads is a really easy way to track that.
So you might say that in 2020, your New Year's Resolution is you're going to read 20 books,
and then you log everything you read on Goodreads, and it'll congratulate you at the end of the
year if you hit your goal.
And if you want to get really nerdy, the BookTuber Portal in the Pages has this downloadable
spreadsheet, I'll put the link in the description box below,
where you can keep track of all of the stats about your reading, from page count to genre
to whether or not the book was in translation, which by the way is another good challenge
idea for the challenge jar, is that you have to spend a month reading books in translation.
Or your New Years Resolution might be to invent your own really creative way of deciding your
TBRs.
So there are some booktubers doing some really really cool things you can look to for inspiration.
Becca and the Books does Bookopoly, where she's created this whole Monopoly board where
every month she goes round and decides her TBR from that.
And then Nicole from a beautiful chaos of books created her own version of it based
around thrillers, which is Thrillopoly.
Codie's Book Corner has a Wheel of TBR that she spins every month and decides what to
read based on that,
and Lianne from literarydiversions does these Stack It videos, where she picks a stack of
books from her shelf, and then the rule is she has to read those books in order.
There's no skipping, there's no swapping the order, no reading multiple books at once,
there are just so many fun ways to decide what you're reading so get creative.
Or, instead of shaking up what you read, your New Years Resolution might be all about shaking
up how you read.
So you could make a list of bookish things that you never ever do, like maybe you never
quit reading books half way through them if you're not enjoying them, maybe you've never
joined a book club or buddy-read a book with a friend,
maybe you've never tried reading multiple books at once, maybe you've never gone to
a book signing,
so you could write down all of those challenges and then maybe put those in a jar and pull
one of those out every month.
One really lovely New Years Resolution idea is to support independent bookshops, so you
might make it your resolution that for a whole year you're only going to do your book shopping
at indies, which is actually really fun and will help you discover some new favourite
bookshops.
Your New Years Resolution might be that you just want to read more often, so you could
do something like buying yourself a calendar and some gold stars, channel that primary
school energy, and stick a gold star on every day that you managed to read say at least
20 minutes every day.
And again it's quite addictive trying to earn the stars all the time.
Or finally, it might be really really simple, your New Years Resolution this year might
just be to never leave the house without a book.
So do comment below your ideas for New Years reading resolutions so we can all get some
new ideas.
And I wish you all a happy new year.
See you in 2020!