2013 Wrap-Up and 2014 Looking Forward

Now that 2013 has drawn to a close and 2014 is upon us, I wanted to take a minute to reflect on the books I read last year and what I'm planning for in 2014. The formatting of this post was inspired by this post at For the Love of Books.

2013 Wrap-Up
I read 71 books, which was one book above my goal of 70 books. I was a little surprised, because at the beginning and middle of the year I was certain would be reading quite above my goal. Near the end I knew I was struggling to meet my goal, but I did it, with one extra book!

Ratings
17 of these books were 5 stars
     4 of these 17 books were re-reads
28 of these books were 4 stars
22 of these were 3 stars
3 of these books were 2 stars
1 of these books was 1 star

My average star rating with re-reads was 3.80.
My average star rating without re-reads was 3.25.

Pages
The longest book I read was Gone by Michael Grant at 558 pages.
The shortest book I read was Glitches by Marissa Meyer at 32 pages.
In total, I read 24 128 pages total in 2013.

Shelves
4 of these books were re-reads
3 of these books were graphic novels
10 of these books that were not re-reads made it onto my favourites shelf
2 books were short stories or novellas
2 books were anthologies

This is the TBR I made last January, a year ago, for the books I wanted to read in 2014. Let's see how I did...

1. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
2. Divergent #3 by Veronica Roth
3. Study series by Maria V. Snyder (I read the first two, Poison Study and Magic Study, so close enough)
4. Gone by Michael Grant
5. Legend and Prodigy by Marie Lu
6. Angelfall by Susan Ee
7. Cinder by Marissa Meyer
8. Chaos Walking trilogy by Patrick Ness
9. Eon duology by Alison Goodman
10. The Girl of Fire and Thorns by Rae Carson
11. The Demon King by Cinda Williams Chima
12. Under the Never Sky series by Veronica Rossi
13. Demonglass and Spellbound by Rachel Hawkins
14. The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater
15. The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater
16. Second Chance Summer by Morgan Matson
17. The Giver by Lois Lowry
18. The Archived by Victoria Schwab
19. The Program by Suzanne Young
20. Mind Games by Kiersten White
21. Any John Green book
22. Any Sarah Dessen book

Fourteen out of twenty-two! That's not too bad! I still want to read all these books on this list, though some are less of a priority now than they were a year ago. Still though. I did fairly good!

2014 Looking Forward
I've pretty much given up making lists of what books I want to read in a year. However, I do have a few goals for 2014. I am going to include those goals in my resolutions post in a few days. For now, I'm going to be mentioning some must-reads and also introducing you to my new way of operating my blog! (:

If you regularly check my blog, you'll know that I never stick my TBR's (except, miraculously, I'm on an eight-book, sticking-to-the-tbr streak - who knew?). Anyways, it just wasn't working. I kept promising to read things and I either never received the book from the library in time or I just didn't get around to reading it. Well guess what? Problem solved! In replace of a TBR, I'm going to be taking a screenshot at the beginning of each month showing what my top-priority shelf on goodreads looks like. Each month there will be 18 books on that shelf. This is a great way of solving my problem, because it shows a large variety of books that are all possibilities that I may read, but leaves room for my reading "moods" or book-acquiring complications.

Here's an example of what my TBR will look like. This one is from December 24, 2013.

I will share one of my goals with you right now: Finishing series! Here is a list of series I want to finish this year.

1. The Grisha trilogy by Leigh Bardugo
2. Legend trilogy by Marie Lu
3. Dustlands trilogy by Moira Young
4. Partials Sequence series by Dan Wells
5. Fairytale Retellings series by Jackson Pearce
6. Delirium trilogy by Lauren Oliver
7. Unwind Dystology series by Neil Shusterman

Here is also a very short list of books and series I am definitely going to start this year.

1. The Darkest Minds by Alexandra Bracken
2. Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi
3. Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell
4. Breathe by Sarah Crossan
5. Across the Universe by Beth Revis 
6. The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness
7. This Song Will Save Your Life by Leila Sales

Thanks for reading! Stay updated for more posts. Happy New Year!!