Beat the Backlist and My 2018 in Books

I've just discovered a great new challenge, Beat the Backlist. This challenge aims to help you clear all the older books on your TBR rather then just jumping into every tempting new book or ARC that comes along.  Beat the Backlist is hosted by NovelKnight who seems to have the best reading challenges! There's also regular or Epic Reading Bingo to play alongside, as well as a Hogwarts mini challenge if you're up for it.

I'm excited to see what I can do on this challenge, as my huge TBR shelves and kindle are a constant source of stress to me though I still can't stop buying new books or requesting advance copies of all the gorgeous looking new releases. This will be a good incentive to read some of my own books before getting more. I've decided to set myself a target of 25% of my reading this year, which is 50 out of the 200 books I have on my Goodreads challenge.

Speaking of which, here are some stats from My Year in Books (image and stats taken from Goodreads)

I managed to smash my target of 150 books, getting through 187, 50 more than the previous year (could have been a couple more if I was allowed to add my half books that I was left with at the end of the year!)

This covered 55,614 pages! (I can't even imagine what this looks like in actual physical pages)

My longest book was a re-read of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (this was actually on audio, I absolutely LOVE Stephen Fry!)

My average rating was 3.8 (this sounds about right. There were quite a few that I really loved but I'm not too good and DNF'ing so I forced myself through a few that were not so great too)