Q2 Challenge Report 2016

Well, the year is half gone. I’ve been reading diligently away, but as usual I haven’t been keeping a running tab on the numbers. So now it is time for The Reckoning.

2016 Goodreads Challenge

As I mentioned above, I have been reading diligently. I finished another thirty books this quarter, bringing my running total to sixty-eight for 2016. I set the metre at 130 books back in January, and I seem to be just a titch ahead of schedule at 52%. However, thirty books this quarter is definitely down from the thirty-eight I polished off in Q1.

Maintain Diversity Awareness

Last year, my main reading goal was to read more books by diverse authors. I set some fresh goals in January, but I didn’t want to lose track of this priority, so I decided to keep crunching the numbers in 2016. Eight of the books I read in Q2 qualified, or about 27%. I reviewed all but one, so that worked out to about 35% of my review posts. This is definitely down from 2015, and still a bit of a fall off from Q1, though I’m staying above the minimum level I set for myself. I have also been reading other types of diverse books that wouldn’t have qualified for last year’s narrowly focused challenge, including LGBT+ books, and books about mental illness and disability.

Even out my fiction to non-fiction ratio

In 2015, only about 23% of the titles I read were non-fiction. In Q2 2016, I’ve read ten non-fiction titles, or about one-third of my total reads. However, I reviewed seven of them, so things might look a little better on the blog, as that is about 35% of my total reviews this quarter. Still, it is a drop from Q1. Overall, that’s 37% of this year’s reads, and 42% of the reviews. I’m doing better than 2015, but not as well as I would like to be. This one is hard because there are always more fiction books I want to read, and I can typically get through them more quickly.

Read More Canadian Literature

In 2015, I only finished eleven Canadian books the entire year. I read a whopping eight in the first quarter of this year, in large part thanks to Canada Reads. This quarter, I read a more modest three, but that still means that I have already read as many Canadian books in the first half of this year as I did in all of 2015! I also ran into some interesting questions about what to categorize as Canadian. For example, We Stand on Guard has an American writer, and a Canadian illustrator. It is set in Canada and about Canadian characters. I decided to be conservative, and not count it for the purposes of this challenge, but one could just as easily justify the opposite decision.

Update Blog

I polished off a lot of my big goals for this one in the first quarter. My outstanding items were to update my photos, and launch a new feature. Naturally, I did neither of these things, because I decided to try out something else instead. You might have noticed that I have been experimenting with a greater variety of posts. I participated in a meme, and wrote a reflection post about it. I posted a list of the reasons that I love audiobooks. I had my brother on to write a guest review, and I shared a preview of some of the forthcoming books I got a peek at during Emerald City Comic Con. I’m not committing to any permanent changes at this point, but it was fun to try branching out a bit beyond strict review posts.

So that is the balancing of the books. How are your 2016 reading goals going?