This year is the third year that Book Riot is running their #ReadHarder challenge aiming to get people to widen their reading horizons. I first found out about it late in 2015, thought it was a great idea but didn’t have time to get anywhere near getting it done, so had a look at the list at the start of 2016, read through the categories and went off about my business. Halfway through the year I remembered about it again because of mentions on the Get Booked Podcast (they did an episode of recommendations for some of the tougher categories) printed a copy off and noted down what I’d done, congratulated myself on being more than halfway done and then promptly forgot about it until 12 days before the end of the year.
At which point I discovered that unless I stretched the boundaries of the criteria I was missing a few categories and it was going to be a mad scramble to finish it off. And of course life got in the way again, and I didn’t finish. I ended up missing four categories out of the 24 categories, but a couple of the others are a bit of a stretch/slightly tenuous.
So I’m going to make a big effort in 2017 and try and do it this time. It’s a really clever way of making you think about what you’re reading and expanding your reading boundaries – which is something we all should try and do. I may average 5 books a week – but if I’m not careful they end up being two romances, two cozy crime books and some historical fiction. And I want to make sure I’m doing more than that and this is a handy, easy way of doing this.
You can read BookRiot’s article about the challenge here and if you want to join in they also have a handy editable pdf that you can download and use. I’ll keep you posted on how I’m getting on – for a start I’m going to add a line to the monthly stats about how many of the categories I’ve ticked off until it’s done and hope that the accountability will force me to remember and do it properly this time!
Fingers crossed…
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 