Should you set a yearly reading goal?

All Books Aloud

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Happy New Year! Who doesn't love a good year-end round up?! Join us as we talk about our year in reading, our favorite books of 2023, and what we're looking forward to reading in 2024. We discuss the pros and cons of setting reading goals, complete with research that will not only let you off the hook with your yearly reading goal (if that's what you want) but will also get you out of having to walk 10,000 steps a day :)
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Books we talk about in this episode:
2023 reads we haven't talked about on the podcast:

• Someone Else’s Shoes by Jojo Moyes
• Part of Your World by Abby Jimenez
• Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
• In The Likely Event by Rebecca Yarros
• Homegoing Yaa Gyasi
• A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf by Emily Midorikawa, Emma Claire Sweeney, Margaret Atwood (Foreword)
• Under the Henfluence by Tove Danovich
• The Hobbit, Fellowship of the Ring, Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien
• The House in the Cerulean Sea
• A Rip Through Time by Kelley Armstrong

Our favorite books of 2023:

• Happy Place by Emily Henry
• Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld

Books on our TBRs for 2024:

• Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
• 10 Things That Never Happened by Alexis Hall
• The Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard
• Death Comes to Marlow by Robert Thorogood
• Song of the Huntress by Lucy Holland
• 1000 Words: A Writer's Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Round by Jami Attenberg
• The Paris Novel by Ruth Reichl
• The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna
• Main Character Energy by Jamie Varon
• My Life in France by Julia Child
• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
• The Fragile Threads of Power (Threads of Power #1) by V.E. Schwab
• Ruthless Vows (Letters of Enchantment #2) by Rebecca Ross
• House of Flame and Shadow (Crescent City, #3) by Sarah J. Maas
• Funny Story by Emily Henry
• Thy Empyrean (The Empyrean #3) by Rebecca Yarros
• Le Fay (Morgan Le Fay #2) by Sophie Keetch

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Sources listed in the order they appear in the episode:

• Duke’s Fuqua School of Business. 2015. "Why Counting Your Steps Could Make You Unhappier." Dec 21, 2015. https://www.fuqua.duke.edu/duke-fuqua-insights/etkin-counting-steps.
• Etkin, Jordan. 2016. “The Hidden Cost of Personal Quantification.” Journal of Consumer Research 42 (6): 967–84. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucv095.
• Maintenance Phase. April 25, 2023. "The 10,000 Steps Myth." https://maintenancepha

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Intro and outro music: "The Chase," by Aves.
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