A Virtual Bookcase

At the start of the New Year, I signed up for the Goodreads Reading Challenge for 2025 to help me discover my joy of reading again. I set a realistic goal to read 30 books throughout the year; next year I’m hoping to increase it to at least 40.

I was once an avid reader and could sometimes get through two or three books a week; the last few years I’d be lucky if I got through that for the year. Kidney failure and dialysis, combines with the associated concentration issues and chronic fatigue, left me feeling exhausted and disconnected from the person I once was.

I had also decided to restart my book blog A Virtual Bookcase that I had also stopped due to my declining kidney health, and write reviews about all the books that I manage to read. I’m so glad I took the plunge. I’m not going to lie, it can be hard work sometimes, and I do get exhausted, but it has definitely given me a bit of me back. As well as an avid reader, I was once an avid writer too, unfortunately not published, but I could write for hours. I haven’t done that for a long time now; write blog posts has given me back my love of writing and helped me achieve another goal – writing on a regular basis.

It’s now over halfway through 2025 and I’m a little bit behind in my reading challenge. I have been busy working on A Virtual Bookcase and my kidney journey is similar to a full-time job, and if I’m honest catching up on Netflix has been on my schedule too. Can I get away with calling that research?

So far I’ve read 11 books out of the 30, and need to read another seven books to hit my target to date. Give me a couple of days, and I would have finished another book to add to my total.

I have every faith that I will be able to achieve my goal of 30 books; once the colder seasons come round I tend to spend more time curled up with a good book. Do you read more in the winter time or do you get your best reading done when the sun is shining?

One thing I’m not going to do if I don’t quite achieve my goal is stress about it. These kinds of reading challenges are meant to be fun, and there is always next year. Life can (and does) through a few curveballs our way and things don’t always go as planned. But one thing I would have achieved no matter how many books I would have read, is discovering the joy of reading again. And as a bonus a decent book blog that I have managed to spend hours working on. That makes for one happy bookworm.