So it’s the end of 2018. Good riddance, really. It’s been a hell of a year, right? I didn’t actually fully complete any of my reading challenges – I totally bailed on my intentions to read the American History book (Oops) – but I’m still pretty satisfied with my progress on the rest.

I completed 42 out of the 50 PopSugar tasks.

I did 19 out of the 24 Litsy Booked tasks, even if I didn’t do so well at actually posting them to Litsy!

I finished last year’s Read Canadian Challenge (It goes July to July) and didn’t do this year’s.

I DEMOLISHED my original Goodreads goal of 100 books. As of this writing, Goodreads says I’ve read 209 books (I upped my goal to 200 midway through the year, when I hit the original 100!). I’ve read 64,992 pages, according to Goodreads. I’m going to round that up to over 65,000 since I’m most of the way through The Dreaming Stars!

I haven’t gone back through and tallied things, but I feel pretty good about my personal goal of reading more minority authors. Once I actually started looking for them, I found my reading list absolutely FULL of minorities! From black authors to Asian authors to LGBT authors, Jewish authors, Middle-Eastern authors, Native Americans, Autistic authors (I simply do not have the room to link all the books I’ve read this year!) – the variety of stories is amazing, and once you’ve found a couple of places that are publicizing minority authors, your reading list will be too full to complete, very quickly! It’s honestly astounding how easy it is to overlook them if you’re not actually looking for them. And these stories are SO. GOOD. So that’s a total win this year. I was horrified when I originally looked back through the blog and realized how white my reading had been. I hadn’t purposefully been excluding minority authors, so why weren’t they represented in my reading? But that is fixed now, and going forward. I love the non-Western European fantasies I’m reading, and seeing old tropes reinvented for minority stories. That’s probably my favorite thing about what I’ve read this year. I’ve fixed my reading habits and I’m definitely the better for it.

Another pretty big win – Around April and May I started trying to post here almost every single day, and I’ve mostly succeeded. I’ve only missed 10 days since the start of May! There’s been a distinct positive effect on the blog’s views, so that’s pretty exciting. I’m still very much a small-time blogger – I haven’t broken 1000 views in a month yet – but every month it gets a little busier!

I’m currently in the middle of the #EndofYearathon, a mini reading challenge hosted by Amanda at Classy x Book Reviews and Vicky at Vicky Who Reads. I unfortunately haven’t had a lot of time to read since Christmas; I read Give the Dark My Love for a book released in 2018 (review will be up tomorrow!), and I’m currently reading The Dreaming Stars (sequel to The Wrong Stars) for a Christmas-colored cover. (Red, Green, or Gold – this cover is gold.) I hope to read Black Wings Beating for the “Over 400 pages” prompt, Silence Fallen for the “next in a series” prompt (Mercy Briggs), and any of a NUMBER of books on my nightstand for the “before 2018” prompt.

Tuesday I’ll be posting my Best of 2018, so I won’t go into that here. Next Sunday I’ll detail my goals for the blog (and life!) for 2019! I hope everyone has survived 2018 more or less intact, and may 2019 be a better year for everyone!