Alright, so, in the last post, way down at the bottom, I mentioned about sometimes reading things outside of my comfort zone due yearly challenges. Well, I wanted to go in to more details about that subject.
Since the early 2000 teens, I started to attempt the Goodreads Book Challenge. If you don’t know what that is, on the Goodreads site, you can sign up to take a challenge of reading X amount of books in a year. You can customize it to fit your reading speed and how much time you have to read. If you are a very busy person always on the go or a slow reader, you can pick reading 10 books a year. If are one of those crazy fast readers who can read a book a day, you can pick 100 books a year. You can pick whatever number you feel comfortable with. I’ve seen 20 books a year, as well as 200 books a year.
I normally go with 50 books a year. For the first several years that I attempted to do the challenge, I failed to get even close to 50! But each year I slowly increased my book count, climbing that ladder of books. For the last 3 years I have not only accomplished 50 books a year, but I have been going over it! Last year I read 68 books out of my goal of 50 books. 😮 I was blown away.
This year, I decided to make it a little bit more difficult and moved the goal number to 65 books read in 2018. But that’s not all! 30 of those books have to be books from my TBR (To Be Read) pile. One day I would love to be able to read 100 books a year, but I think that is still a ways away for now.
As if giving myself a higher number to complete wasn’t difficult enough, in 2018 I decided to join the #ReadICTChallenge! I have no idea what the ICT part stands for? I also don’t care! I found this list on a facebook post from the local library. It is a list of 12 different challenges or themes to read in 1 year. What makes these challenges, well, challenging? They are set up to buck you out of your comfort zone and dare to pick up books that you didn’t know about or might not have tried otherwise. Some of the challenges seem pretty easy, others can have you digging in google trying to find a title, topic or author that will fit. It is basically like a book scavenger hunt!
As you can see from the picture, these 12 topics were almost completed while still in the early part of the year! I was having so much fun with the reading challenge list, I didn’t want it to end so soon. So I started to look around for something longer and more challenging.
After browsing and rejecting smaller book lists, I came across one that looked pretty epic. It is a Goodreads group called Popsuager and they do a yearly book challenge called Ultimate Popsuager Reading Challenge.
This list has 40 different challenges to accomplish in one year! :O Holy crap! And some of the topics…. just crazy. This was a serious challenge alright. Just about every one of them had me digging in the books I already have, or searching google for titles that could fit. Some of them, I still have zero clue what book I’m going to read for it! But this list has been so much fun! I love a good challenge and I love to hunt for books. Even if they are books I would never have picked out for myself, there is just so much satisfaction in the challenge, even if the book ends up being something that you don’t like that much. This is my first year doing a Popsuager challenge and it has been a blast! I don’t know if I will be able to finish it…. Each month it gets harder and harder to find a book that will fit in to those last few categories. I know I will be back in the following years to attempt these crazy lists again and again.
And if I didn’t have enough trouble trying to fill in that Popsugar list, in June Goodreads came out with a Summer Reading Challenge. For the months of summer (June, July, and August), you have a set of challenges to accomplish for each individual month. Each challenge is summer, beach, or water related. At the end of the list they also had a misc. section of challenges that you should attempt at any time. These challenges were not summer related.
So now for summer I have the added task of this list! Trust me, I am trying to fit titles in as many challenges as I can. 😀 Hey, nobody said you can’t use the same title more than once! Hey, and while I’m being honest, I will admit that yes, I do try to fit horror titles in to as many of the challenges I can! 😛
I am absolutely in love with the book challenges! They are difficult and they take time and energy. You have to be willing to make the effort to find the books and then be motivated to read something that might be out of your comfort zone. But I just can’t get enough of them. It’s like a game. But with books. How can that not be awesome? 😮
Creature From The Book Lagoon 