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?
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.
I think I had a friend introduce me to Storygraph but I hadn't made the move over to that platform as I found it didn't have some of the books that I was reading when I wanted to track them.
Do you find it works out well compared to Goodreads for your use? I really only use Goodreads to track books I'm reading/read/want to read.
I never used Goodreads so I don't really know how it compares. When I decided to use a tracker, googling told me SG was good for stats and it's a small, independent business. My ideal would really be a database tied to a graphing library that I can throw SQL and have spit out charts (I would totally switch from Premium to some Gold Premium Supermax plan if SG added a quasi-SQL to Graph feature). I like to glance at reviews and I like having the pretty pictures or else I'd consider switching to a spreadsheet.
I get the occasional book that's not on there, often things by local authors or self-published. More often I'll find my specific edition isn't on there, largely because I collect a fairly niche publisher's series of books from the 60s. Once you get used to it it's really not hard to just add the book yourself, most complex part is taking the cover picture and cropping it so it doesn't look shitty. You can also import by ISBN often, even if it's not immediately in the SG DB--if it's not pre-ISBN that is.
I'll have to take another look at it. I hadn't considered adding extra books on there since I had really joined for this one friend and ended up back on Goodreads. I feel like having more stats would be interesting, since I've enjoyed tracking my reading hours and everything with the ereading app I use on my phone.
/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.
When I started reading again for fun again a few years ago I set my reading goal to one book per month, and I've kept it at that since then. My feeling was that if I increased it to a book every two weeks or something, I would avoid longer books that might take longer to read, or reading that longer book might be stressful as it would feel like I'm falling behind.
My overall goal is simply to keep reading for fun (not aiming for a large amount of books read), and having the goal at 12 books per year encourages me to keep reading while allowing me the freedom to pick any book I want. I could increase the goal as I typically overshoot it, but this philosophy has served me well these past years so I see no reason to change it.
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.
I've mildly participated in the Goodreads reading challenges in the past few years when I was getting back into reading. This year, I discovered the extra challenges and I have been reading books on those lists to get those cute little bookmarks! Almost all the extra challenges so far this year have been awesome, and mostly in my wheelhouse, however this quarter, two of the challenges were definitely not something I'm interested in reading, and it was a struggle to find books from those lists that interested me. I slogged through a memoir this week, and it was fine. The way it was written was very different from most books I've read, and I can't say it was my favorite. I have the literary fiction book I found most interesting from the list on hold from the library, and I hope I like it, sine I've read the two books on the list that actually were on my tbr earlier this year.
I generally try to read 2 books a month, but this year, I've been tasked with a few projects at work where I can just turn my brain off and do manual tasks, so I've been able to listen to tons of audiobooks.
I've got the same username over there if you want to friend me!
I appreciate the offer to add me on Goodreads, but I use that to connect with people I know IRL so it has my full name. Maybe one day, I'm always down to chat about books if you wanted to DM me. I have an ever-growing to read list that I'd happily throw more books on if what you're reading sounds cool!
I saw the extra reading challenges, but I haven't gone out of my way (yet) to start trying to go for them. Who knows, maybe in the next few years.
No worries, it was a more open-ended offer to anyone who's interested in adding me. I'm always looking for book recommendations from people I even tangentially know.