Let’s continue on with the book theme, now shall we?
Here’s a fun little tidbit. Towards the end of 2024, I hit a reading slump. Nothing was catching my eye, nothing was piquing my interest. Manga I’d enjoyed earlier that year bored me. Novels I’d waited all year for were set aside.
I was a right mess.
And then… I discovered a reading challenge.
Okay, now let’s be fair. I’ve been doing the Goodreads Challenge for years now. Set a goal, read that goal, bask in the glory of finishing that goal before the end of the year. But just reading x number of books in a year because a chore, a task to do. There was nothing interesting about it.
Until there was.
Throughout the year, Goodreads has been setting little reading challenge. Read a book off of a specific list, and get a fabulous prize! Also known as stroking your ego and boosting your reading goal by reading books that are probably outside your preferred genre and comfort zone. The challenges had to be completed within a specific timeframe, usually two months or so.
Thanks to this challenge, I have read award winning books, books by marginalized authors, Queer positive stories that have been in genres I would normally touched… The Goodreads Reading Challenges have very much opened up many doors for me.
But that’s not the only official reading challenge I’ve done this year. I discovered that Barnes and Nobel has their own, which isn’t very well advertised. And actually, they did two.
Barnes and Noble’s Reading Challenge presented 52 prompts around the year, meant to be weekly, though you could easily read ahead if wanted. The prompts were for the most part one word challenges, such as “prequel” or “relaxing, “avoided” or “memoir”. A kind soul over on Storygraph made a reading challenge page for it, which has made keeping up with the challenge much more manageable.
On top of this, Barnes and Noble also did a 14 week Summer Reading Challenge, with the fourteen prompts being common summer themes, from “hot dogs” and “forests” to “shark week” and “campfire stories”. I was the one who set up the challenge over on Storygraph (which has been a lifesaver this year), and it went well, I think.
Because of these reading challenges, and my own personal goal to attempt to not overlap book picks all that much if possible, my reading goal for this year when from high and probably insane to very much possible, with added manga to the mix.
Here’s hoping that next year brings more reading challenges that are fun and inventive, but also allow for readers’ choice.
Happy reading!
