A post from Sydney.
It's the end of the year! I have a special place in my heart for this time of the year. Obviously, I love the holidays. But I also enjoy taking a moment to look back on the year that was, and make plans for the year to come. This year in particular, I know we all are ready to wave goodbye to the mess that was 2020, and we look forward with cautious optimism to the beginning of a fresh 2021. One goal I have decided on is to find new ways to shake up my reading for 2021.
I am facing the fact that I probably won't complete my Goodreads Reading Challenge for this year. You would think that all that quarantine time would have let me read more, but it just didn't. The disruption in my schedule, the strangeness of working from home, worry, and all sorts of other things wreaked havoc on my reading. I thought it was just me, but apparently reading anxiety was fairly common this year. How can we bring back our reading mojo?
Setting yourself a reading challenge might help. For several years, I have set myself a numerical goal with the Goodreads Reading Challenge. It's kind of fun to check in periodically throughout the year and see how you are doing. You race against yourself from prior years, and it's not stressful. But this year, it was also not really that inspiring.
There are tons of other reading challenges that give you suggestions of genres to try. These challenges help you break out your comfort zone by giving you a push to try something different. They often have Goodreads groups or message boards where people suggest titles to each other, in case you need ideas. I had no idea that "food memoirs" were a thing until it came up in the BookRiot Read Harder Challenge a few years ago. I read Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, by Gabrielle Hamilton to fulfill that challenge. (It was unexpectedly fascinating--and the author grew up in my hometown. Bonus!)
Here are just a few of the reading challenges out there. You can find a lot more with a Google search!
- PopSugar Reading Challenge
- Back to the Classics Book Challenge
- British Crime Classics Reading Challenge
- Uncorked Reading Challenge
- Reading with Muffy Challenge
- The Calendar of Crime Challenge
- Pretty Mess Reading Challenge
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