Making Reading Goals + Reading Beyond Your Comfort Zone

Hey everyone! You haven’t read anything from me since last year. 

Okay, sorry, I had to get that out of my system. My whole family has had to live with my New Year’s humor this week, and you were not going to escape my wrath. 

New Years has come and gone, and we’re back to good ol’ January. Maybe, if you’re like my family, you partake in New Years Celebrations at your cousins’ house, and on the three-hour drive home, your baby sister hits your brother in the head with a wooden toy, thus giving him a huge goose egg and possible concussion. (THAT was an interesting drive)

No? How about something else: goals. This is the prime time to make new goals! And since we’re readers and writers, it’s a great time to make goals related to reading and writing. 

This week’s post is going to dive into goal making, keeping track of your reading, and some tips for how to read beyond your comfort zone. Plus, there’s a special gift at the end of this post!

The Best Type of Journal

I am not a journaler. I’ve tried, and tried… and tried again, but I’ve never been able to keep a journal regularly updated. I keep a journal for keeping track of lists, projects, and the occasional rant or (hopelessly unpoetic) poem of teenage angst, but that’s as much as I can do. 

Then, this past year, I was able to keep a journal regularly updated. Granted, this was a different kind of journal. For Christmas, my dad gave me a journal specifically made for keeping track of my reading. I wrote down nearly every book I read in 2021. The nice thing about this journal was that I didn’t need to regularly update it every night. I updated it as I finished reading a book. And the results were pretty awesome.

Why keep track of your reading? 

Reading has many benefits, along with keeping track of what you read.

For one, keeping track of what you read can help you notice patterns in your reading habits. You might not realize just how many stories in a certain genre you are consuming until you actually keep track of it and look over how many. This can come in handy when you want to change up your reading routine. 

My specific book journal had a section to write a mini review. With every one of those mini reviews I wrote, I got better at streamlining my thoughts about a book. Then, I could easily pick out what aspects of the story I enjoy and what aspects I don’t enjoy. From there, I got better at picking out how a story works. Even the books I didn’t enjoy offered up something to learn. 

For example, maybe I got really confused while reading a book with a large cast of characters, and then a little later I read another book with a large cast, but I didn’t get confused. I could use the two mini reviews on these books to see the differences and similarities between them, which could show me why one was confusing while the other wasn’t. And then, when I’m writing a story with a large cast of characters, I can have an idea of how to make it less confusing. 

Expand Your Reading Horizons 

We read books for many reasons. To be entertained, to have our thoughts prodded, to learn a new skill. A lot of us read books for comfort, to transport us to a different world.  I often find myself reading books with adventure and summertime fun during the depths of winter, when all I want is to go outside without bundling in a hundred layers. 

Because we often read books that do what we want them to do, like reading a funny book when you really need to laugh, it can be challenging to make ourselves read harder books. Reading is such a comforting activity, why would we make ourselves read something that isn’t comforting? 

The thing is, growth doesn’t happen if we stay inside of our comfort zone. You won’t discover new interests or learn new writing techniques if you don’t read new, and possibly hard or uncomfortable books. Reading out of your comfort zone can help you grow as a person, as a reader, and as a writer. 

One of the best ways to do that is experiment with genres. Instead of sticking with your regular fantasy and mystery books, change it up with a contemporary romance or a classic, or maybe even a historical fiction book. You might discover that you can’t stand contemporaries, but you could also discover that historical fiction is super fun! 

It’s great when we read books that are comforting, that give us what we want when we can’t have it, like summertime in winter. But if we want to grow in our reading and writing, every now and then we need to step outside of that comfort zone to take on some new reading adventures. 

I’ve created a super easy way for you to find new books and get out of your reading comfort zone. Get the perfect checklist to expanding your reading horizons HERE!

Don’t worry, I promise not to open with a cringey joke next week. I’d love to hear, what are some of your reading goals this year? Do you keep track of your reading? Are you a journaler? Thanks for reading, and have a great rest of your day! 

-Hannah

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