M. Suzanne Terry

Now that we’ve covered the challenges I didn’t quite finish in 2023, let’s move on to the challenges I want to work on next year. 

I’m not going to make it to the 180 books I planned to read this year, but I’m going to try again in 2024. I did, however, read a few more than I finished last year, and I still have almost a week of reading to go. So lofty goals help me read more even when I have long, dry periods of no focus. I’ll take it.

I’m also back on my nonsense of choosing four different challenges (three for the whole year, one for summer). It was good to take a year off, but I missed them, and I got a little jealous when I saw the communities discussing and recommending books for the categories. 

I’m going with my favorites:

• Book Riot’s Read Harder Challenge – I like this one because it’s designed to diversify your reading list, and it definitely does that for mine, both in authors and genres represented. 
• POPSUGAR Reading Challenge – I love the whimsy of this challenge. The prompts are unusual, and I especially like that the prompts follow a theme (and that the theme is “dictionary”). 
• The 52 Book Club Challenge – Designed to help you average a book a week, the prompts on this one also make you think outside the box. As an added bonus, I adore this community, and they have super cute merch. I have my own tracking system in place but if I didn’t, I’d be scooping up that journal in a flash.
• Modern Mrs. Darcy’s Minimalist Summer Reading Guide (not out yet, obvi) – This is my favorite online bookish community, and they put so much thought into their reading guides. Maybe I’ll actually finish this one this year. Maybe I’ll even finish it in the summertime. 

For those of you who are clicking the links and doing the math…yes, you are correct. If you total the number of books on the four challenges (assuming 12-ish from the MMD Summer Challenge), it comes to 137. By the time I fill in their blanks and read for the book clubs and other social reading I do, that doesn’t leave me a lot of open choices for just fun, which is absolutely essential to my reading life. 

The way I get around that is by allowing the same book to count for multiple challenges. In fact, I delight in finding books that fulfill different prompts. A little thrill rushes through me when I discover one that works for all of them. So I can probably read 60-70 books and still complete them all, leaving the rest of the 180 with quite a bit of wiggle room.

I’m so excited about these challenges that I may not even wait until January 1 to start. 

Do you like reading challenges? If so, what are your favorites?