The Gist: Sharing my 2025 reading goals and challenges that keep me motivated—from tackling my backlist to staying on top of BOTM picks!
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Reading has been my hobby for 15 years now. While it’s a go-to stress reliever and something I love to do, I also have goals that I want to work towards. Setting specific and attainable goals and participating in reading challenges helps me stay on track and motivated! However, in 2025, I’ve tweaked how I’ve set up my challenges by trying to make them more achievable and embedded with broader goals lingering in the back of my mind for a while.
In addition to the nine main reading goals I’ve set for 2025, I’m also participating in two hosted challenges: the TBR Knockout Challenge and Buzzword Reading Challenge (book cover edition). These are more just for fun and are the only challenges where I use books I mood read to fulfill the prompts.
Goodreads Reading Challenge
My Goal: 150 books
This is a self-explanatory goal, but it actually looks a lot different compared to years past—the number of books has been reduced by more than 200! Given my new job, I decided to make my Goodreads Reading Challenge more achievable—I needed reading to be more about relaxing and having fun than being stressed about overcoming a challenge. Also, I didn’t really know how working full-time would impact the number of books I read in a year, so I settled on 150 as an achievable goal.
Beat the Backlist
Beat the Backlist is the only hosted challenge part of my reading goals because I find the Bingo game so fun. As mentioned in the title, this challenge prioritizes your backlist – the only books that count are published and purchased before 2025. I know reading my backlist is a refrain frequently echoed in the book community, but I’m determined that 2025 is the year I’m going to tackle it.
24 500+ Page Books
Quite a few of my backlist books are over 500 pages, and most of these are also 5-star predictions. But because of their length, I keep putting them off; they feel like too much of a commitment in my limited free time. So, this goal not only encourages me to pick up my chunkier backlist books but also prioritizes longer reads. Over the past few years, I’ve been slowly increasing the average length of the books I read as I noticed my enjoyment of the novella-length romances decreasing.
Read 60% of Books Purchased
This goal is connected to my Beat the Backlist challenge – while I want to read down my backlist, I also want to make sure the books I buy during the year are being read. It doesn’t make sense to commit to reading down my backlist only for me to buy a bunch of books this year that’ll end up on next year’s backlist. This helps me be more intentional with my book purchases and keeps these books at the top of my mind when figuring out what to read next.
12 Nonfiction
I have a decent collection of nonfiction that I’m very interested in reading but keep putting off because they take me so long to read. Over the past few years, my goal has been to read two nonfiction books a month, but this wasn’t a realistic goal. I hope to read (or at least start) a new nonfiction book every month so that by the end of the year, I will have read 12. I want to make this a habit, so I’m starting small and trying to develop consistency before committing to a larger goal.
Brandon Sanderson Backlist
With the release of Brandon Sanderson’s fifth book in The Stormlight Archive series, Wind and Truth, last fall and all its surrounding hype, I decided 2025 would be the year of Brandon Sanderson so that I could finally dive into The Stormlight Archive series. On my backlist were the last two books (and novella collection) in his Skyward series, the Mistborn trilogy and his standalone Warbreaker. I want to read all of these before The Way of Kings as this seemed to be the most recommended reading order to ensure I enjoyed the Easter Eggs in the Cosmere-based books and got used to his writing style and world-building before diving into a 1,000-page tome. This is my first year doing an author backlist challenge, and I’m really enjoying it!
More New 5-star Reads than 5-star Re-reads
I’m a massive re-reader, so I have a tendency when I’m grappling with what to read next or when I’m in a low mood to just grab a book I know will be a banger. But, as a consequence, it means I tend to avoid books that I think will be a 5-star read because what if they’re not? Therefore, I’ve created this new goal to encourage me to be intentional about the books I pick up. For instance, if I’m in a low mood, I want to be in the mindset to pick up an anticipated new release or a book I just bought before turning to a re-read.
Read My BOTM Books the Month I Get Them
Last year, most of my book purchases came from the subscription service Book of the Month. I loved the early access to new releases and being exposed to books I typically wouldn’t consider reading. Also, the affordability was amazing – new release hardcovers in Canada are upwards of $35, whereas the subscription came out to around $28 (and add-ons are just under $16).
As a result, I was buying more books that I was reading, and while the books are all ones I want to read, many are in genres that are outside my comfort zone, so I haven’t been prioritizing them. This is why, going into 2025, I made a promise to myself that I would read my Book of the Month purchase within two months of buying it. Otherwise, I have to skip the following month until that book gets read. This is another goal that feeds into a much larger one: reducing my 2026 backlist!
Read the Lord of the Rings Series
I desperately wanted to read The Lord of the Rings series last year. My family and I rewatched the extended version of the movies last year, which put me in a fantasy mood. But since I wanted to take my time reading them, I ran out of time. I’m really excited to finally dig into this series and see what all the hype is about!
In Conclusion
If you read the list in my cover photo, you’ll have noticed that I didn’t discuss one goal: to read 50% of my backlist. This is because most of these nine goals are smaller goals or reading challenges that are helping me work towards this bigger goal.
What are your reading goals for 2025? Are you joining any reading challenges? Let me know in the comments!
x Sarah
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