With it now being July, that means it’s time to check in on how we’re doing toward the reading goals at set at the start of the year. Now, my reading goals are focused on reading new-to-me authors and ensure that I’m not reading only white author and only straight stories. Using the Storygraph’s tag feature, I’m able to check in with my stats regularly on how this looks. Q2 itself was I read some amazing books, but I was really lacking on my goals. What that tells me is that I need to have a greater focus on this in Q3 to remain on track and improve a few of the statistics through the midpoint of the year. Let’s look at the goals and the progress.
Goal #1: 50% of my reads are by Black, Indigenous and Authors of Color.
Goal #2: 50% of my reads are by new-to-me authors.
Goal #3: 50% of my reads feature Queer characters (note: I am mindful of who is writing the Queer stories when I’m picking them up as best I can be).
All well and good, but how are we doing at the midpoint:
Goal #1: 55% of what I’ve read are by non-white authors, with Black authors making up 35% of my total. The only reason this is exceeding the goal I’ve set is because Q1 I did incredibly well with ensuring I was reading across varying races/ethnicities and need to be more mindful of that going into Q3.
Goal #2: 45% are by new-to-me authors. I’m happy about this statistic. While I love finding more new-to-me authors, I am also trying to remove books from my owned TBR and have been trying to balance my reading with reading from my own shelves. I’m happy that 50% of the books I’ve read this year were ones that I owned print copies of and could remove from my owned TBR.
Goal #3: this is the goal I need to better focus; 27% of the books I’ve read are Queer. To note, this is assuming that the queerness is stated so there are no assumptions. 17 authors I’ve read this year have publicly stated their Queerness. This is a goal that I want to improve in Q3 and not lose the progress I’ve made with the other two goals stated above.
Overall, I’m happy with the progress I’ve made with my goals and am excited to see how I progress with this goal moving forward. In closing, I do want to mention that the best way to ensure you’re reading widely (even within your favorite genre) to read a wide array of experiences and identities is to actively track the information. The only way you can be mindful is to put in the work to pick up works outside what is pushed in the industry (which is largely hetero and white). Happy reading!