As usual, I give you a round-up of the trials and tribulation for my reading challenges, and tell you which ones I’m doing for the coming year.

Lessons learned from Reading Challenges in 2020

  1. Don’t take on hefty reading challenges (like 60 for Goodreads) when you are working on editing and publishing a book. Especially to a tight deadline.
  2. Don’t take on reading challenges when you have an increasingly bad eyesight challenge and the treatment for it is severely hampered by a pandemic.
  3. Don’t take on so many new titles from Netgalley. I seem to have said that last year.

Results for 2020

Reading Challenges achieved easily:

  • 2020 New Book Challenge. I was well past my target in the first five months. I kept putting new books into other challenges and not listing them under this one.
  • Non-Fiction Adventure. A 5 books a year, 10 years, for my 50 books in target. In 2019, I’d read an extra 3, so I gave myself a stretch target of 7. Thanks to several unmissable non-fiction books in my special subject, all issued this year, I reached my stretch target with no trouble at all. I’m now half-way through my ten year odyssey in just four years. I haven’t made much inroads into all those lovely books on my shelf, though, and I got three more this year to add to them.
  • ColourCoded Challenge. I don’t know why I added this except it’s pretty and easy and gives me a sense of satisfaction. And picking up Zig Zag Girl even gave me the pesky last one.
  • SpaceTime Reading Challenge. Even though I host this, I was having trouble fitting qualifying books in till the autumn. But then I ended up reaching my target quite easily.

The ones I struggled with:

  • Alphabet Soup. Even my weird mixture of the author and title version still left me hunting for an X. Mostly I used titles, and by the time I finished, I could have wiggled them about a bit and got them all to titles, I reckon. But I filled them easily – it was just the perennial X-factor that got in the way.
  • Cloak & Dagger Challenge. Maybe I was cocky since I beat it so easily last year when I wasn’t signed up for it. This year I struggled, but ended up finding enough crime in books I wasn’t expecting to be cloak & dagger to scramble into the achievement zone (rather than a target, this has zones).

The one that finally didn’t get away!

I got to the top of Mount TBR!! Yay!. It was a desperate struggle through November and December, and I would like to tahnk several authors for the short books they wrote, but… I did it!

As a result of those, I easily did my Reading Challenge Addicts Challenge, too!

Reading Challenges for 2021

Look, I like new books. And I want to get more books off my TBR, which I’ve managed to keep at 100 fewer than the total number I’ve read. That’s a target in itself! I have hundreds of books on my kindle, some of which weren’t on my TBR list when I was looking for short books. There may be more of those in there. I’d rather read than check them all against my TBR.

So this year I’m keeping it simple:

  • Alphabet Soup, because it’s fun. 26 titles (including X)
  • Spacetime Reads, because it’s my Challenge! (10 books for Interstellar Explorer)
  • Non-fiction Adventure, because this is the fifth year of ten, and I only have to read five books in a year.
  • Mount TBR, because it’s the thing that spurs me on to get my books read. And I’m going for Mount Vancouver (36 books) again. I know I can achieve it, but I have to try hard. And more probably isn’t feasible.

Are you doing any Reading Challenges this year? Tell all!

Reading Challenges – successes, failures, and promises

7 thoughts on “Reading Challenges – successes, failures, and promises

  • 4 January, 2021 at 1:20 pm
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    Congratulations!!! Good work.
    Happy New Year.
    Shalom aleichem

  • 5 January, 2021 at 12:46 pm
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    Good luck with your reading challenges. I don’t enter them but try to read a lot and keep my TBR list under control. Unfortunately, there’s always way too many books I want to read to keep it down. LOL.

  • 6 January, 2021 at 5:01 am
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    I use to do a bunch of reading challenges. I found quite a few books I might not have picked up otherwise. I don’t know that I’m signing up for any, other than Goodreads, this year. I’m still trying to get over 2020.

    I hope your New Year is going well. I only read and reviewed 23 books last year, but my goal for this year is 30. My other goals are to publish another fiction book in 2021, do the Blogging from A to Z Challenge in April, and increase the number of authors helped by Operation Awesome.

  • 6 January, 2021 at 7:33 pm
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    I think that after a complete flop in 2019, I didn’t even sign up for the Space-Time challenge this year. So of course I binged on Becky Chambers I at least got 3 or 4. Maybe time to try again. For the most part, 2020 was a lost year for reading and challenges.

    • 7 January, 2021 at 10:13 pm
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      You can sign up any time up till December…

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