I’ve been talking a lot about 2020 with my recaps (and I’m not quite done yet) but now that I’ve wrapped up my 2020 challenges, I want to get into my plans for the new year. Here are some of my goals for both my blogging and my reading in 2021!
Side note: will I ever be able to type 2021 without first typing 20201?
2021 Blogging Goals
I wrote 129 posts in 2020, my second highest in a year since starting this blog, though without my June hiatus I likely would’ve broken past my 2017 record too. But it was also my highest viewership by far in my almost 5 years of blogging (2x as much as last year and almost 1.5x from my highest post year)! I’m really pleased that this year when I felt I’d found more of my voice and shared many creative features, readers really responded!
As someone who doesn’t like to put too much pressure on my reading, I signed up for an awful lot of challenges last year! I’m not usually into planning my reads ahead of time as I just go where motivation takes me, but it helped that most of the challenges I set for myself were aimed at tackling the books I already own or want to read.
You can check out my initial challenges post for 2020, but below I’ll go into detail on how I did!
2020 Challenges
I like to keep my TBR pile in check so I always set a goal to reduce my Goodreads to-read shelf to under 200. I made it to 198 by the end of the year! Though of course that’s already increased with new books I’ve learned about this year 😛
Still catching up on reviews of my 2020 reads so I’ve got more mini reviews for you this week! A couple more books I enjoyed last year, and that are all quick reads if you’re looking for shorter length books.
Pemmican Wars by Katherena Vermette, illustrated by Scott B. Henderson Genre: YA Graphic Novel
I’ve had this series on my list for a little while but didn’t realize just how recent a release it is (the third book came out in 2020). So I’m looking forward to continuing with the series as new books come out. My review here will be based on the first 3 books in this series, A Girl Called Echo (but no spoilers!), as each book is quite short so it’s difficult to review their impact on their own.
We follow Echo, a young Métis girl living in a foster home and struggling with being separated from her mother. As her history teacher starts his lesson on the Pemmican Wars, Echo finds herself transported to the 1800s and gets to experience this history first-hand. A bit of dream-like fantasy mixed in with history. Each book tackles a different event or time period in Métis history so readers can follow this timeline through to the present. There are some fun Easter eggs in the illustrations too, like real books on the shelves when Echo goes to the library that I loved being able to identify.
The only thing holding me back is that they’re very, very short! They’re all under 50 pages and there are several spreads in the book that are solely illustrations. As someone really interested in this history, I would’ve liked a deeper dive but I do appreciate these books as a starter so I can seek out more sources, which are included in bibliographies in each!
