Reading challenges
I started using the Goodreads annual reading challenge years ago. I generally treat it as an arbitrary target to see if I can read that many books in a year. I have found myself in recent years enjoying hitting that goal, and have found myself slotting in more shorter books in my reading between larger stories that I'm reading to help me reach that goal. This has in turn helped motivate me to dive in to some older sci-fi and fantasy works, which are usually shorter or standalone.
If I'm a couple of books off the goal I set at the end of the year I don't mind, but it is interesting looking back over the last few years seeing how this goal has shaped how I read since I've needed to adjust my reading habits to maintain a similar number of books now that I have kids.
I thought it would be fun to see how other Tilders approach this, if at all:
- Do you participate in any reading challenges, and if you do, which one(s)?
- Have you found the reading challenge changing how you read, or which books you read?
/r/fantasy bingo for me, I do it religiously with multiple themed cards per year. It makes me read a large number of books I wouldn't have otherwise picked up (or known about) because I'm doing things like searching for novels with the word "Empire" in the title and no other criteria to pick them up - many of them turn out to be really terrible haha but I do also find a lot of really great stuff this way!
I've thought about doing the bingo card for years, but I always have so many books that I'm wanting to read or series that I'm in the middle of that I never found myself drawn in to trying to match my reading to the card categories. Maybe this is something I'll give a go when the 2026 card is created to try something new as a challenge for a year.
I use Storygraph and did a couple of theirs this year. I did the "Storygraph reads the world" which was just 10 countries, I also added an actual read the world challenge (as in every country) that's more a long-term project.
I ran into the lemmy.world/c/books challenge, it's like an offshoot or similar vain as the /r/fantasy one I believe. It's not technically focused on fantasy but highly inclined that direction (very few prompts work for nonfiction for instance). But I liked it as it has several creative categories (like "orange" is one) that led me trying different things. Would love to find more challenges like this where it's clever categories not just like diversity or country or alphabet or book club, ideally ones where it's not focused on specific genres.
I tried searching through some of the other storygraph challenges but so many of them are utter trash. At this point I'm just doing reading streak and books per year while working through my never-shrinking year-tall to-read pile.
My local library does a reading challenge every year and sends out a list with 104 prompts. The suggested challenges are to read one book a month, one a week, or two a week (I would love it if they added something between one a month and one a week - there's a big difference between 12 books per year vs 52). I loosely aim for 52, but won't stress if I don't quite make it.
It has definitely encouraged me to branch out from my usual genres, especially for the more quirky prompts. Part of the fun is figuring out what categories a book fits under and shuffling them around on my spreadsheet if I read something that fits a prompt better. This year's list has some classic ones like fantasy, memoir, and beach read, but also includes stuff like "has a snake on the cover" or "title contains an element from the periodic table." Some prompts are decidedly not my preference, but I'll never hit 104 so I have plenty of room to pick and choose.