It's 2016!

Happy New Year everyone! It's hard to believe that 2016 has actually arrived, but time marches on, I suppose. Normally on the first of the year, I post my list of most anticipated reads for the coming year. It's probably one of my favorite posts of the year, so look for it tomorrow or the next day.

Today, a little something different. The Cybils shortlists were announced today! Go here to check out the finalists in every category. Even though I completely dropped the ball on participating this year (I didn't even find time to nominate anything!), I'm super excited to see the finalists. Of them, I've only read 2 picture books, 6 graphic novels, 1 middle-grade fiction, 2 young adult fiction, and 1 young adult non-fiction. Crazy! I apparently missed a lot of great stuff this year, but I'm kind of excited about that - it means I have a lot to look forward to reading! What about you? How many have you read?

Other than Cybils news, I wanted to use my first post of the year to outline some of my 2016 reading goals. There are a lot of things I hope to accomplish this year (not just in reading), I thought it might help me accomplish my goals to put them out there and hold myself a bit more accountable. Any reading-related goals (which are the only ones I'm going to outline for y'all here) I plan on including in my monthly check-in posts, you know, to help with that whole accountability thing. So, here goes!

- I have a general goal of reading 250 books this year; it's the same goal as 2015 and I passed it (by 30 or so). However, as I've mentioned, I did read a lot of graphic novels toward the end of the year and I don't anticipate the same for the coming year. That's why I didn't up my number at all, but we'll see how it goes.

- I plan on participating in Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge this year (along with my husband). I love a good reading challenge - I used to participate in one on Goodreads - but I can get a little obsessive. Book Riot's challenge is manageable - it works out to an average of two tasks per month - but will still push my reading boundaries in good ways.

- I want to read more non-fiction - I almost always enjoy it when I read it, but I don't seek it out as much as fiction. I think 10% of my reading is reasonable to start with, so I'm aiming for 25 non-fiction books this year.

- We built a book tree for Christmas and it made it abundantly clear just how many unread books we have in the house (as if moving in 2015 didn't make that clear enough); I want to try to remedy that this coming year. I'm not going to say no library books this year, but I'm going to try much more mindfully to focus on the books I already own first. I'm not setting a hard and definite goal here, but I'll be working at it.

- I read a lot of series - I think that's pretty common for people who love youth literature - but I'm really bad about starting a series and then not finishing it in a timely manner. I finally made a list of all the series I have in progress; it's shamefully long. So this year, I'd like to finish (or catch up for series still in progress) at least 5 different series.

- I'd like to read more diversely in the coming year. I'm not going to swear off white men (because of other goals like the books in my house and finishing up series), but I would like to include more diverse reads. Again, I'm not going to set a numerical goal here; I'm just going to try and see what I can do.

That's it! What are your reading goals for 2016?