Biblio: Creative Challenges

With the huge growth of Goodreads, a literary social network of massive popularity, it feels like more people than ever before are officially challenging themselves each year to read a set number of books. Whatever your preferred tracking system, it's a blast to see how the year turns out and look at all this amusing data about your past reads. 


In terms of finding a community to do your challenge with Goodreads is obviously full of them, but there's also a great 52 Book Challenge on Reddit that is full of people loosely following a book a week challenge.

Instead of focusing on the total number of books read, you could also add some sub challenges to keep things interesting and help guide you in choosing your next book. Within that challenge to read 20 or 50 or 100 books, make up some boxes that those books need to tick off. 

You could make yourself read 5 books of a certain color cover, or read one of each color of the rainbow.

Read your way around the world by reading a book set in each US state, or try to hit one from each continent. I seem to read nothing but American, Canadian and Western European settings over and over again, and could definitely do with expanding my horizons.

Read through the alphabet A to Z and see what letters you really have to dig for to check off. 

Or read your way through a decade by hitting books published in every year of a set timeframe. 

Figure out which movie adaptations are coming out this year and plan to read those books first so you're ready to be a well-informed whiner about any discrepancies. 

 

Maybe you're going to do the classics. You know, the ones you lied about reading in high school and instead browsed the Cliff Notes while your mom drove you in. Turns out they aren't so bad!

You probably have some rebel in you, so it's always worth looking at lists of the most commonly banned books. I'll spare us all from a chat about censorship, but it's nice to actually utilize the freedoms that librarians are always fighting for every now and again.

What do you think? Would you consider doing some sub challenges instead of just planning on reading a set number of books? Do you already use some guiding principles to determine what you read in a year?