Looking Forward

Hi All! 

Again, it's been a while and normally I'd apologise and promise I'll get back on track and post regularly - but I'm not going to do that this time. This time we're going to look forward fully instead of looking back, after all it's a new year right? 

So, I'm not going to make any promises, I'm not going to sit here and say I'm going to post and read regularly. I'm going to do what I want to do, and do what's right by me. I don't want this to feel like a full time commitment, this is meant to be a way for me to unwind - not stress me out with deadlines. This year is going to be me posting what I want when I want, and it's not always going to be regular - my mental health is too irregular to promise that. 

Instead I want to talk about what I want to do going forward into 2019 with this blog and my reading. 

I'm going to listen to an audiobook for the very first time - kinda shocking I know. I just never thought I would like them but I'm going to give it a try. I've downloaded an app on my phone through my local library account to listen to them for the first time. I've just downloaded The Book of Dust by Philip Pullman and I have 21 days to listen to the whole thing, and I'm kinda excited about it. I've been wanting to read this book for ages and now I'm listening to it for free!

That brings me onto something else I want to do with my reading this year. I am going to use my library more. I loved libraries when I was a kid, unfortunately at the end of the day I am a book reader and collector, and even as a child I hated that I could never keep them. I still like to keep the books I read, but I've decided I need to utilise the library more, and stop wasting so much money buying books I don't even like half the time. I have already reserved two books for myself at my local library and I'm really looking forward to picking them up soon. 

I'm not setting a goodreads target this year. I refuse to do it. In some weird way I find those targets pressuring, for some reason it becomes bigger than a silly little goal on goodreads and it becomes this massive requirement looming over me. Sometimes I feel like less of a reader for not completing it, but that's fucking stupid. I didn't complete my goodreads goal for 2018, and I'm kinda glad about that. I'm glad I didn't force myself to read books I wouldn't have enjoyed just to finish it. So fuck the goodreads goal, I'm reading for myself this year instead of some target that doesn't matter.

Other than my reading habits and how I want to change them just a little, I've also decided I'm going to change how I use this blog. If you look at my older posts you can see how I've talked about my mental health a bit (which is still trash btw), but I don't want to that anymore, not on here at least. So I have set up a more personal blog called Metis where I plan to do that. I think it's kind of therapeutic for me to write about my struggles and what I'm deciding to do about them, and I wanted to have a space separate from this blog to do that. So the goal with this bog moving forward is that it will be about books and anything related to that or movies and music maybe (I'm not sure yet), and nothing personal. 

I hope that made sense to all of you as it did to me in my head. If any of the people that follow this blog have stuck around then thank you, I don't know why you've bothered, but still thank you. Since this post is all about looking forward if there is anyone reading this (and I'm not sure how likely that is anymore) please comment books you think I should read this year, or any of your anticipated releases for this year!