Did you read a lot this past year? Or, like me, somewhere around a book every week or two? Did you read a book a month? Twelve books a year is the honest average and the healthy challenge ~ so many of us here on booktube read so much that some even dip into triple digits. It is all well and good, especially when you get the fun of ranking them to ferret out the top ten!
While my goal is still around 30 books, I do hope to read more. Is that perverse? After admitting a book a month is the healthy pace? When I look at how quick I can devour a book I am enjoying, I could easily read a book every three days… but there is more to life than great horror novels. There is meeting great horror authors! I had the pleasure of having met a few of the authors in my top ten, so come along and see who they might have been!
For my 2022 cull, check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9C-zkfBWNo
On reading challenges…
An article on CBC about reading challenges caught my eye recently, “Since When did reading books become a game?”. The article focuses on the Goodreads challenge of course and that’s part of why it caught my eye. I suspected due to the wrapping up of the 2023 challenge and the beginning of the 2024 challenge that’s what it would be about. The author goes on to talk about how many other challenges might be a little bit more fun like reading your height, reading the alphabet, or reading only blue books or books with cats as the main character and then explores the general reading challenge of ‘x’ amount of books. Some of the facts in there from Amazon were interesting to me like the average pledge of 43 books per person; sounds about doable, it sounds about right. 12 books a year, however, is even more comfortable for beginners and I wish more people would start slow.
Another fact that caught my eye was that 4.4 million people have signed up for this year’s challenge. That is amazing and apparently a bumper year. I think that it’s partially due to things like booktube and booktok popularizing the fact that this challenge exists.
A reading challenge should not be taken as work or homework or a sport at all it should be 100 percent pure fun so if you are setting a goal more than one book a month then really ask yourself if that’s if that reflects the amount of books that you typically already read; or if this is a benchmark that’s being chosen by somebody else. Maybe someone who reads books for a living. There are booktube channels where they’ve read over 200 books in the year and to a certain extent reading ‘is’ their job. They are also a lifelong Avid Readers who might have read that many books without any challenge or monetary benefit to doing so.
There is a challenge mentioned in the article called the FOLD challenge from the Festival of Literary Diversity. It is a 12 book guideline to diversify your reading this year and I think that that’s a really good challenge if you’re looking to gamify your reading. Now, while reading a hundred books a year is great for publishers and authors it’s not good if you’re not reading close enough. John Meidema wrote a book called Slow Reading a couple years ago that I thoroughly enjoyed and it reminded me that we should slow down and read more closely. If we’re unable to do that because we’re speeding through a book to attain some we are losing a lot of joy that can be found in the written word.
If you find yourself compelled to join a reading challenge like the Goodreads reading challenge but want a little more structure, perhaps those ideas would help. You can also stop by your local library and see if they do a reading challenge already. Other social media groups may have them too, or local book clubs may as well. Just be mindful that you read at whatever pace you already enjoy instead of adding to what you would naturally read. If a book club is 12 books per year that should be a fit for anyone, and be more friendly and community-minded than just reading ‘x’ amount of books… or like so many of us… just pick a number out of a hat and apply it to your Goodreads challenge this year.
My method has been to aim for a book a week; and fail happily by reading around 30 per year.
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I talk horror books; extreme horror, classic, slasher, gothic, and everything in between. Helping you find the next best horror book to read is the goal, and sharing new and old horror from my shelves and new releases is how! Horror, nonfiction and even true crime can be found here as I find that human beings are the scariest thing of all.
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