Reading Challenges

"A reading challenge is a good way to get some focus into your reading if you feel you don't know what to read next, you want to expand your reading horizons, become an expert on a given subject, or break out of a bad reader's block. Hunting down the books can be half the fun if you assign yourself a specific set of books and they turn out to be out of print or otherwise hard to find. Different challenges suit different people. Some may do a modest book-a-week challenge for one year or plan to read all of a specific author’s books, while others may be more ambitious and embark on a lifetime reading plan. Some may want to cover every number in the Dewey catalogue. Including the fractions would be a bit too much for most, but by taking whole numbers only you would get 999 books and many years of targeted reading. Here is a list of more possible reading challenges:

* All the books that have won a specific literary award: the Pulitzer, the Nobel, the Booker etc.
* The 100 best novels or non-fiction books of the 20th century.
* An A-Z challenge: read, in alphabetical order, books whose author’s last (or first) name begins with a given letter of the alphabet, or read books with ABC titles.
* An A-Z challenge: read, in alphabetical order biographies of people whose last name begins with a given letter of the alphabet.
* One book from or about every country in the world, or the states of the USA.
* One book about all the different sports.
* One book about all the different religions.
* Books that have been banned or challenged.
* Books that formed the foundations of a specific genre, for example science fiction or mystery.
* Every book in a given series.
* One book from each year of the 20th century.
* The top best-sellers from a given period of time.
* An unfocused challenge.

Other rules were that you could not read the same author twice, rereads were only allowed if you had forgotten what the book was about, each book had to belong to a different sub-genre than the last, and you would try to read as many new genres as possible."

Paraphrased and borrowed from http://52books.blogspot.com/

I have always tried to challenge myself to read at least 26 books a year about one every two weeks. I usually exceed that number and my reading is pretty unfocused. I find an author I like and read most or all of their books. I read according to my moods. I usually look for something upbeat and not depressing. A real challenge would be to read every book in my personal library.

So many books, so little time. The more I read the more I want to read.