Reading Challenges!

Coll

I have been told that I might have picked up too many reading challenges this year, but I refuse to believe that. Of course I am doing the Read Harder 2016 Challenge. I always love the prompts for this challenge. I know Tiina will complain about the horror book but she always complains about horror. I will break her of that eventually. As far as I am concerned, I don’t think many of the prompts would be problematic for me, with the exception of a few. The collection of essays I was concerned about, but I will stick with an author I know I like and read Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris. The audiobook might present a slight issue for me because I am not good with those. I blame my bad attention span when it comes to listening to people. Now as for reading a book out loud to someone, that one will be harder on my husband than me because he will be forced to listen to me read. Mwahaha. But yeah, other than that I think I will have a smooth time with Read Harder.

The second challenge I am doing is a basic A-Z challenge. Of course the hardest ones with a challenge like this are the odd letters, such as Q, X, and Z. For Q I will read Qualify by Vera Mazarian, the first book in the Atlantic Grail Series. It is YA sci-fi and I have heard good things about it so I am looking forward to it. For X I am stuck between two: X-It by Jane George, because it takes place in the year I was born (1980) during the punk era in New York City, and then XY Axis by Karen Bishop. For Z am planning on reading Zeitoun by David Eggers, which has been on my TBR for a while. That takes care of the hard letters and the rest should be okay.

Then there is the Thrift Books Challenge. This one is pretty short but Tiina added a little twist to which she’ll explain below.

My fourth challenge is a Word Hunter Challenge. It is simple enough: you find all the words in the provided word hunt puzzle (you know, the boxes full of letters where you have to find words and circle them) and read books whose titles include words found in the puzzle. Fairly straight-forward.

My fourth challenge is, well, the most challenging. ;-) The Classics Scavenger Hunt. There is a list of 50 prompts related to classics (50 years or older in this case) and you complete as many as you can. I enjoy a lot of classic sci-fi and horror so I will get to read a lot of those, but some prompts such as a book written by an author with a sibling author, a book written by an author with your same initials (another CZ, really??) and a few other will prove difficult. And what is with the challenge “A book from an author you love that you have not read yet“? How can I love an author I have never read? Yeah, I don’t know about that but okay.

And yeah, I think those are all my challenges. I feel like that should be enough for the year. ;-)

Tiina

Like Coll I am doing the Read Harder 2016 challenge. I think it’s one of the most interesting – and yet at the same time doable – challenges out there. It comes with a handy .pdf printable with boxes to tick. So great! If you want, you can also use one book for more than one challenge. I will try not to do this, though. The only thing that could be considered “cheating” is that I’ll use an audiobook for more than one challenge. Also, when you send them a picture of the completed challenge, you get 30% off your purchase from the Book Riot shop. That’s a great incentive for readers who don’t have to put up with crazy international shipping fees ;-).

Now, that is not to say the Read Harder challenge isn't completely intimidating. There are 24 prompts, which is not a lot of books considering I managed to read over 170 last year (I also count short stories and comics if they are on Goodreads). However, there are quite a few that are well out of my comfort zone. Examples? A play. I tend to only read one a year (Wilde ones). Technically, that is good enough, I guess ;-). A horror book is also going to be difficult – I can only read those during daylight hours ;-). Yes, I’m a big pansy, and no, I’ve no idea why Coll is still friends with me. I also foresee issues with the books about politics and religion. I know they can be fiction, but still, that is not my usual reading fare. I mean, that statement is fully tautological since that’s the main aim of the whole challenge. Now, where was I? So far I’ve only finished with four prompts. A collection of essays (Mindy Kaling’s Why Not Me?), a book that I read out loud to someone (The Ladybird Book of Dating – this was hilarious by the way; I read it out loud to a colleague during a quiet moment in the library) and the final one so far, a book that is set in the Middle East (The Curse of the Pharaohs by Elizabeth Peters). I could have read an actual e.g. Egyptian author for that one, I guess, but this one was just too tempting not to use it for the challenge.

The second one I’m doing is the Thrift Books reading challenge. There are only 12 prompts, so I made it a little bit harder by allowing myself to use only books that I actually own for this challenge. It’ll be difficult, since I’m too tempted by Scribd, my Kindle, and and the library I work in… One down, eleven to go in that one!

I am sure I will partake in a few readathons during the year – we’ll probably also repeat our own TBR-athon this summer where we come up with a few challenges and read only our own books for a few weeks. Great fun! Now, this was by no means as a brief post, but I hope you enjoyed it. Are you a fan of reading challenges? Do you even see the point of them? We’d love to know what you think! Thanks for reading and I hope you appreciate that I refrained from “challenging” puns! :)