#goodreadance2020: time for some cleaning!

September is already here!

This catastrophic year is almost over, and honestly? These last few months went by pretty quickly, in my opinion.

So, September is already here, and with it a new beginning! School is starting again, I begin a new job at a publishing house… Let’s hope it’ll get better from now on.

To help us get started on the right foot, Shealea @ Shut up Shealea thought of a nice challenge. Who doesn’t have crumbling shelves on Goodreads, full of books we didn’t have time to review, books we once wished to read but have since forgotten?? Well, I certainly do! But thanks to her Goodreadance challenge, this time is almost over!

Also, can we take just a tiny moment to really appreciate this amazing pun?

The Goals:

What is this challenge really about? If you like to read more about it, I advise you to head over her blog. Otherwise, here’s a quick list of the main goals:

Sorting or organizing your shelves on Goodreads
Removing book titles that you are no longer interested in
Updating or changing your star ratings
Writing Goodreads reviews for the books you’ve read
And most importantly, sharing your approaches, goals, and personal experiences over time

My situation before the challenge:

This is the part where we finally face the mess our Goodreads accounts have become… Take a free ticket for a trip down Guilt Lane!
Ok, but for real, what is my situation? As for now, I have 7 different shelves on Goodreads, besides the 3 main shelves (« Read », « Currently Reading », and « To-Read« ). Those 7 shelves have not been updated in… a long time. Some seem to have the same purpose. Most of them don’t have a real purpose. That’s a huge mess. I mean, that’s the first huge mess.

Next, I have 492 books filed on my « To-Read » shelf. That’s… a lot of books. The real problem is not the number, but I do not remember most of those books. Why did I add those books? Are there duplicates? Do I still want to really read them? Those are the questions I’ll ask myself while going through the shelf.

And finally, I have read 101 books since creating my account, but only written 46 reviews.

These are the main points I want to work on during this month while juggling with my new job and my master’s thesis, and you know, life in general. This will be fun.

My goals:

What are actually my goals for this month?
I’d like to create new and accurate shelves, which will replace the chaotic ones I have right now. I’d like to have something organized and clean, and not spend hours scrolling through them in search for THE book, to end up giving up.

I think my main goal will be targeted towards my « To-Read » shelf. There are just too many books on it — books I do not care for anymore, books I’ve forgotten, books that revealed themselves problematic… This will be a huge unhaul of books I actually do not possess — but, you know, it’s the thought that counts, no? I’m not setting a specific number to reach, but the more books I get rid of, the better. If I can divide that number by 2, that’ll be the dream.

And finally, concerning my reviews, I don’t think I’ll update them too much, nor that I’ll review more (because I’ve read some books a while ago and I simply don’t remember enough to write something about it). But I’d like to update my most recent reviews simply to link them to the full reviews I posted here.

This is all pretty simple, I want to go easy and not put too much pressure on myself, as I’ll have plenty with the new job, the thesis, etc. Reading, blogging, and books in general, are supposed to be my hobbies, not something I stress about. So this is a nice challenge to set oneself, and I hope to achieve most of my goals — I don’t want to put too much pressure on myself but I do like organized clean thingies.

I’ll post my wrap up next month on the blog, but in the meantime, you can follow my progress on Twitter, where I’ll post a #Goodreadance2020 thread.

In the meantime, happy Goodreadance to everyone!
Are you participating in the challenge? What are your goals?