My Reading Goals for 2022

Hello readers!

I like to set a few reading goals every year to make sure that I am getting to the books I want to get to and not only the stuff that I impulsively pick up (thrillers, it’s usually thrillers). There are many books that I love but need a bit of a push to get myself to pick them up, or I forget to finish series.

1) Get my TBR to 50 books

In 2021 I managed to get my TBR to 100 books (a bit lower, even!), so this year I want to get to my final goal: 50 books! I know that realistically I cannot get my TBR below 50 because there will always be a million things I want to read, but I want to make sure that my TBR consists of the books I am actively interested in reading soon, and not just a bunch of books I bought in the last decade and forgot about. Huge goal! Not sure I can accomplish this, but I can try!

2) Read 10+ non-fiction books, at least half must be NOT true crime

True Crime doesn’t even feature among my favorite categories, but somehow I always end up reading a lot of them (?). I guess it’s all the hype. There’s lots of nonfic I’d love to read, and I want to dip my toes a bit more into history (I’m eyeing The Romanovs: 1613-1918 by Simon Sebag Montefiore since like, 2016), science, essays etc.

3) Finish the following series:

I’ve owned the entire trilogy of The Broken Earth by N.K. Jemisin for a couple years now and picked up book 1 in 2021, so I’d like to finish this series while it’s still rather fresh in my memory! I loved the first book and really want to read more from the author!

The Fall of the Gas-Lit Empire series by Rod Duncan is one of my favorite steampunk series but somehow I haven’t read book 3 yet! It probably didn’t help that I got an eARC for the follow-up series which is about the same characters and immediately read it, which means I got spoiled for the ending of this series, but still. It’s such a fun series and I just have to finish it!

I am not completely sure if the Wayfarers series by Becky Chambers is finished, but I have books 3 and 4 as ARCs, so I’d like to get those done and reviewed soon!

4) Read the following books:

I received Villette by Charlotte Brontë about a year ago and I just really enjoy the Brontë’s sisters books that I’ve read so far – I’d like to read this one to finally make a decision on whether I want to read the entire Brontë backlist. Plus it sounds really good!

I told my husband I’d only watch the movie based on The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro after I read the book, then I simply did not read the book and he’s been waiting forever until I do. I loved Never Let Me Go – I think I’ll really like this one too.

I’ve owned Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi for years now – my husband read my copy and loved it, plus I loved Yaa Gyasi’s new novel Transcendent Kingdom, so I think this will be a wonderful read!

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie was on my list of must-read-this-year in 2021 and it’s back on the list for 2022. I need to read it immediately before this becomes even more embarrassing.

The Best Books I Read in 2021 – Part 3: Other Categories

Hello readers!

Welcome to part 3 of my best books from 2021!

The Best Books I Read in 2021 – Part 1: Brazilian Books

The Best Books I Read in 2021 – Part 2: By Genre

This part is a bit more specific than part 1, where we had the usual categories of mystery, thrillers, contemporary etc. On this part 2 I want to highlight some of the more specific stuff (especially translated lit) that I read and that reflects how my reading habits changed in 2021. I’ve read a LOT more translated books than ever before, which is very exciting and resulted in finding many favorites, and I found out I actually love short stories – but mostly translated ones (who knows why). I also wanted to highlight some of my favorite 2021 releases which didn’t quite make it to any other top 3s but that I wanted to talk about anyway!

When I say translated in this post – I don’t mean Brazilian books. I am not including Brazilian books in the “translations” categories because I have a couple categories exclusively for them, since I read significantly more Brazilian books (translated or not) than from any other non-English-language country. I feel a bit weird about adding Brazilian books to the translated category anyway, and I feel weird if I don’t, so I decided to create categories just for them. Also helps me highlight the books I might want to recommend from my country!

2021 Debut Novels

A great year for debuts! Detransition, Baby blew my mind with how vibrant the characters were portrayed, allowing them to be messy, contradictory, fascinating. I loved this novel SO much. The Final Revival of Opal & Nev is one of the best stories to listen in audio to – it reminded me a lot of Daisy Jones & The Six, with its story set in the 70s and present day, and a big event that broke up the band. This wonderful novel brings to the front a Black woman in the 70s having to deal with the harsh consequences of speaking out against racism. Finally, She Who Became the Sun was SO close to being on my top 3 fantasies! This is a literary fantasy that completely has my heart – it’s beautifully written, epic, high stakes, everything I love in a fantasy.

Did I Read The Most Popular Releases of 2021?

Hello readers!

As a book blogger, it’s sometimes difficult for me to gauge which are the most popular books that people actually end up reading, since the books that get hyped and read in my particular literary bubble is not necessarily what makes it to the mainstream. So I thought it would be a fun exercise to go through the book releases from 2021 that got hyped and people actually picked up – and see if I read them!

For this list I read the two lists below from Goodreads and selected only the 2021 releases:

The 51 Most Read Books of the 2021 Goodreads Reading Challenge

Most Read of the 2021 Reading Challenge (So Far)

I got both because I found that the “So Far” list actually had some interesting titles, and otherwise this post would be shorter than I wanted 🙂

So, without further ado!

A ​Court of Silver Flames by Sarah J. Maas

I didn’t read it! Unsurprisingly. Or maybe surprisingly? I did read the entire ACOTAR series (which comes before this book) but it was years ago and since then my taste in books and steamy romances has changed a lot, so I thought it was quite obvious I was not going to pick this up. Also I did not much care for Nesta in the original ACOTAR so I didn’t care to follow a whole series with her.

The Best Books I Read in 2021 – Part 2: By Genre

Hello readers!

Welcome to part 2 of my favorite reads of this year! 2021 was a pretty amazing reading year for me, hence the need to split my best books of the year in three parts – I’ve read over 150 books at this point and I wanted to highlight a lot of the fantastic stuff I’ve read, which in my usual posts would be difficult to really talk about more than a small handful of books.

Part 1 of this short series is here: The Best Books I Read in 2021 – Part 1: Brazilian Books

Literary Fiction

Litfic is always difficult for me to choose a top 3, because there is a lot of itI can highly appreciate and that I think of often, and there is the stuff I most enjoyed reading – sometimes these books intersect, others, not really. So I spent literally weeks to decide on the following books: If I Had Your Face, a book that fascinated me endlessly (I love anything that discusses beauty standards), The Vanishing Half, a book I could simply never stop recommending to people, and Piranesi, which was so close to being a perfect read and impressed me so much my husband (who doesn’t read much fiction, much less litfic) picked it up and became a huge fan of Susanna Clarke.

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If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha

A debut novel set in contemporary Seoul, Korea, about four young women making their way in a world defined by impossibly high standards of beauty, secret room salons catering to wealthy men, strict social hierarchies, and K-pop fan mania.

My 2021 Bookish Resolutions: How did I do?

Hello readers!

Today I wanted to look back my reading goals for 2021 and check how I did so far. There is a bit of time left with more than 20 days to go but at this point I feel like I know more or less what I’ll read and it won’t change this post a lot.

I talked about my goals for 2021 on the posts below:

Bookish Goals for 2021

Backlisted Books I Want to Read in 2021

So, compiling all the goals together, we have:

1) Read 50-100 books

I guess I technically failed because…. I ended up reading way over 100 books. I’m above 150 books read at this point. Oops.

2) Read at least 10 Brazilian books

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I thought this would be much harder, but especially after creating a book club with my Brazilian family, this got done pretty quickly! By August or so I had completed the challenge. At this point I’ve read 14 books!

The Best Books I Read in 2021 – Part 1: Brazilian Books

Hello readers!

As per every year, I like writing a post with my top 3 books for each category I read this year, which gives me a chance to look back at all the different genres and books I picked up, highlight the books that really stood out for me and recommend the Very Good Stuff in one post.

This year however I am splitting it in three! I am always unsure how to do categories, and I feel like it would be interesting to create new ones that reflect better my ever-changing reading habits (for example, Brazilian Non-Fiction since I read a lot of that this year) than just the general ones (Non-Fiction). So this is how we’re doing it this time: this part 1 has my favorite Brazilian reads, part 2 has the more “usual” categories (Science Fiction, Contemporary etc) and part 3 will have whatever other categories I feel like would be cool to highlight (2021 Releases, Translated Classics etc).

This year I’ve read a lot more Brazilian books than usual, which is why I thought it would be nice to have a post just for them. It will be a bilingual post, and on the English section I’ll let you know which books are available in translation.

Brazilian Classics / Clássicos

[EN] This was such an interesting year for classics – I rediscovered a beloved classic (The Rogue’s Trial / Auto da Compadecida) in audio format, which I had not heard before (brilliant!), and two books for a book club that, although both are classics, they could not be more different: Barren Lives was a slim book, a sober account of a family in the Northeast trying to survive told in a bare-bones writing style, whereas Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands was such a brick of a book, hilarious, vulgar and with wonderful descriptions of food, about a woman who married once following her heart, and later on married again, but following her head this time. All three books are available in English translation, although I think The Rogue’s Trial is actually quite hard to get.

[PT] Este foi um ano excelente para clássicos brasileiros! Redescobri um favorito (Auto da Compadecida) em áudio com elenco completo, o que foi uma experiência incrível e me fez me apaixonar de novo por este livro. Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos e Vidas Secas peguei com um clube de leitura e foram dois livros excelentes que não poderiam ser mais diferentes! O primeiro é um tijolo de 600 páginas, hilário, vulgar e super interessante, e o segundo tem menos de 200 páginas e é mais sóbrio e com escrita direta sem floreios. Ambos excelentes!

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