Do you set goals like reading a certain number of books in a year? Participate in reading challenges?
I don’t set goals around reading a certain number of books. Those have always seemed arbitrary and not helpful for my reading. I have done reading challenges in the past, though—the yearly Book Riot Read Harder Challenge, the yearly reading challenge from PopSugar, book bingo. I like those types of challenges for helping me to break out of my comfort zone and try new authors and genres! I’ve also made my own challenges. What are some of your favorite reading challenges?
I’ve recently started setting myself goals. I used to read non-stop before university. During my undergraduate degree I slowed down to finishing only a few books per year. By the time I started my PhD, where basically my entire 9-5 is reading and analysing dense 40-page mathematical papers, I’d completely stopped reading for pleasure.
Last year I set myself a 1 book per week goal and found that I was actively factoring reading time into my daily schedule, which I really appreciated. I managed to get through a lot of my reading bucket list this way, but at the end of the year I decided I wouldn’t set that kind of goal again. I ended up powering through some novels that I would’ve preferred to DNF purely because it was Thursday and starting a new novel would set me back.
This year I haven’t set a hard goal. I’ve decided I am happy with one book per month, and if I’m reading properly then I blaze past that. I’m very much enjoying the ability to augment my main reading with other reading. I’m currently participating in a book club over at !lovecraft@ka.tet42.org which I find very rewarding and I wouldn’t have had the spare reading time to participate in this time last year.
I’ve noticed myself completing books I would usually DNF when I’ve participated in more formal reading challenges before. I didn’t want to go through the hassle of finding another book that fit the prompt so I just stuck with them.
I had gotten out of the habit of reading for pleasure after college because I felt incredibly burned out on it. That had started to bother me because I used to read as one of my main hobbies, so last year I set the goal of reading 1 book. I did that, and read a couple others.
This year I set a goal of 5 books and was able to do that by March, but then I ended up with about 9 in flight books and wasn’t making much progress with them. I felt like I had them hanging over my head and it was stressing me out, so I’m now working on the goal of finishing them by the end of the month.
Its been really nice to realize that I still do love reading and that I still can finish a book even with all the stuff going on in life, its just a matter of sitting down and reading. I credit a silly goal with helping me remember that.
In my experience, external motivation kills internal motivation. I don’t want to be supposed to read this or that amount - I accept any pace and any pauses.
As of challenges promoting something you may not have considered, I do like the idea, though I don’t believe I’ve ever participated in those, except for some self-imposed ones and the one with Ulysses, which I’m not sure whether to qualify as a challenge.
I participate in a book club bit other then that I don’t do any challenges with number of books. I prefer quality over quantity.
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I joined my first book club this year. It’s been interesting; so far the books haven’t been totally to my taste, but at least I’m trying new things that way. And the discussion has been fun! I think our most fun discussion was for a book that we all ending up not liking, actually!
Not for me, I read when I feel like it. I don’t want it to feel like work or an obligation. Sometimes I’ll go months without a book, other times I’m inhaling them like oxygen (went through about 10 books on trans topics in about a week using ebooks from the library awhile back). After suffering Hegel in my philosophy days, everything feels like light reading in comparison lol. As I’ve gotten older, I find I have more of an attention span for informative non-fiction versus reading fiction for pleasure. I scratch my fiction itch with TV/films and video games.
