By KelliIf you google the Goodreads Reading Challenge, a surprising chunk of the results are articles telling you not to do it: The Bad Side of Goodreads' Reading Challenge Why I Stopped Doing the Goodreads Reading Challenge at Midyear I Quit My Goodreads Challenge and Never Looked Back 5 Reasons Not to Do the Goodreads Reading Challenge A Year of Not Counting: My Time Off From the Goodreads Challenge Don’t get me wrong here. All of these articles make some excellent points. Which is why I’ve linked to them. If I really disagreed with them, I’d just make you search sources out on your own, Fox News Style. When you’ve set a large goal for yourself, the reading experience can sometimes start feeling like all of the focus is on the numbers and not the content. But no one is making you set a large goal for yourself. You don’t have to read as many books as me, or Matt, or Kaylen, or Pey. You don’t have to read as many books as that one Goodreads reviewer whose name shows up on every book you come across. That’s not what the challenge is about. It’s about setting a goal you feel is attainable, and then reaching that goal. Factor in the sort of books that you read. If you tend towards epic fantasies, don’t set your goal at a hundred books. Those babies can exceed a thousand pages each! Dats so many pages, y’all. And also, factor in your personal life. I notice a lot of my friends set their goal at 52 books, because a book a week sounds doable when you break it down like that. But then you realize “oh, I don’t read as much on vacation because there’s so much running around.” And then, “oh, Thanksgiving! Have to get the house ready for family to come over.” And then the month of December, when it’s, “Oh, I have a holiday party every weekend and somehow have to shop for presents too.” So that’s a minimum of six weeks where reading just doesn’t get done. You know yourself. You know your reading abilities. You know your schedule. Set a goal that feels like a stretch, not like a struggle. It’s about setting aside time for yourself to read. It’s hard finding time to read when you’re busy. Part of the beauty of the reading challenge is that it’s a reminder to sit down, pick up a book, and read it. Having a goal to reach gives you a reason to prioritize reading time. Setting a Goodreads goal also leaves you with little time to waste on books you aren’t enjoying. If you need to read thirty books this year and it’s taken you a month to get halfway through Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (but enough about me), then put it down and move on. It’s about finding solutions to reading that work for you For some people, there’s nothing like holding a huge book and breathing in that new (or old) book smell and the swishing sound of a page turn. Which is awesome. Personally? Books are heavy and cumbersome and I’m usually reading three at a time and I am not about to lug that many books around with me from place to place. So most of my reading is done on either my Paperwhite, the Kindle iPhone app, or my library’s digital book app. A lot of people find that long commutes take up the bulk of their non-work day (remember what I said about it being hard to find time to read?). A good solution here? Audiobooks. Either the physical ones with all the discs or the digital ones through Audible or your library’s digital book app. I’ve had people tell me that they’ve tried it before, but they get bored or their mind wanders and they start to miss parts. I struggled with this when I started listening to audiobooks too. I discovered that setting the narration speed at a faster setting (I set it between two and three times the speed, depending on the app that I’m using) forced me to listen because it was going too fast for my mind to even start to wander. And maybe you’re capable of reading obscene amounts of books...like, an obscene amount that your wallet can’t possibly keep up with (I see you. I am you.) So you don’t set a goodreads challenge because any goal that would work for you wouldn’t work for your bank account. I have excellent news for you, my friend. You probably have a library pretty near-ish to you. As long as you pay attention to your due dates, you now have a free solution to your goal setting problem. And if you don’t have a library near you, the library closest to you probably has some sort of digital book service, like Overdrive or Cloudlibrary. So the only trip to the library you need to make is the initial one to get a card. It’s about reading. Period.
And look, I get that sometimes, we all fall a little out of love with reading. I’m on a young adult committee right now (hey, fun game from now on: every time I mention I’m on a committee or say I’ve created a spreadsheet, let’s do a shot!) that requires so much reading that I am honestly burned out on books with substance. To counteract the burnout, I am voraciously devouring romance novels at an alarming pace. I call them my junk food for a reason: while each of them is entertaining, they tend to be pretty formulaic, so I can turn my brain off and just enjoy reading. I have plans to write a post on ways to counteract Reader’s Block, but to keep it short here: if you feel like you’re having an “off” year on reading, pick a different genre. Pick something lighter. Give up on the book you’re forcing yourself to finish. It’s easy to make excuses about hitting the books. Challenging yourself takes some of those excuses away. (And hopefully my unsolicited but well-meaning advice will take some away too.)
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AuthorsKaylen: Reads a bit of almost everything. Has a special love for sci-fi and fantasy. Archives
January 2021
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