“I want to be the person who reads like a small library’s worth of books in a year. I used to be that person.”

That’s what I texted my boyfriend the other day after longingly scrolling through book-related posts on Instagram.

When I was a child I used to carry around books like they were permanently attached to my hand. I devoured multiple books a month. I could read around 1000 pages in a week without batting an eye. And then I hit that age in high school where I felt too old for YA lit but too young for adult literature. Then I got to college and I was being required to read academic literature like I was trying to memorize the library of Alexandria before it burned.

But I would still buy books… and then never read them. They stacked up and looked pretty on the shelf as I stared at them longingly while I was supposed to be reading a chapter on social capital for a media theory class. But over the past couple of years, I’ve slowly been reclaiming my bookshelf and in 2019, my New Year’s resolution is to read an hour a night. Which, if I’m being honest with myself, shouldn’t be hard. I usually spend an hour a night scrolling mindlessly through social media, so I’m going to try and replace that with reading.

My first hill to climb on the challenge is probably my biggest. In 2017 I was gifted the collected set of George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books. My boyfriend got them for me after I became obsessed with Game of Thrones. I was so excited to unwrap them… and then I let them sit on my shelf for a year until I read the first one. Then I let them sit there again until last week when I finally started the second one.

The current goal is to try and finish them before April when the final season of the show premieres. That means I need to read 3-4 chapters a day which takes about an hour so that lines up perfectly with my overall goal. And thanks to winter break, I’ve even been able to get way ahead of that goal. After about a week, I’ve already been able to read over half of the second book in the series, A Clash of Kings. If I stick to four chapters a night, I’ll be done by mid-March, ahead of my April deadline.

To track of my progress, I’ve been using the Bookly app to log my time and pages read, and I’m also using a self-made chapter tracker to show myself how far I’ve gotten into the whole series. I find that progress tracking like this stops me from feeling overwhelmed about the sheer amount of pages ahead of me. If you’re also reading the ASOIF books and want to track your progress, you can download the tracker here. It can be used in GoodNotes, Notability or even as a good old-fashioned printable.

After I’m done with the ASOIF series, I’ve got a whole stack of paperbacks of books from the past few years that I’m excited to pick up.

When I was 12 I used to see 1000 page books as an exciting challenge. When I was 18, I saw them as an impossible task. Now, at 23, I still kind of see them as daunting, but the kind of daunting I know I can overcome, little by little, chapter by chapter.

“I miss being a nerdy bookworm,” I told my boyfriend. 2019 is the year I become one again.