One of the things I most enjoyed about my goals last year was that I had reading goals.1  It made the act of reading feel more purposeful again.  I knew why I was  reading the books that I was reading.2  It also helps me push beyond my perfectionism and that overwhelming feeling I tend to get when I ask myself “what do I read next?”

This year, instead of focusing on several different areas over the whole year, I’ve decided to break it into quarterly challenges and read as many books that fit that challenge as I can before the time is up.  This gives me a bit more flexibility too.  I’ve already got several ideas for different challenges . . . enough to get me through more than just this year.  Some of my ideas so far . . .

  • fairy tales
  • historical fiction (aka The Phillipa Gregory challenge)
  • own-but-unread
  • non-fic3
  • Arthurian
  • celts
  • ???

My biggest challenge in meeting this goal will be school.  I’m enrolling in some more work-related courses this year and am determined to get through one each quarter as well.  This will mean that a lot of my time will be taken up with reading my textbooks and doing homework.  I’m going to see if I can read more books this year, than I did in 2010 (which according to my goodreads stats, is only 23 books – I can do better than that!).

My first challenge is about to begin.  In fact, I picked up the first book in the challenge from the library today and I’m so excited to get started.  But I’m going to save the details of what the challenge is for another blog post.  In the meantime . . . got any other suggestions for thematic reading challenges for me?

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  1. In case you missed my reading challenges last year, I blogged about setting them here, then gave an update here, and blogged about an extra dystopian Christmas reading challenge here. [↩]
  2. Aside from the obvious reason to read stuff out of enjoyment. [↩]
  3. not to mention the subcategories of non-fic that I could delve in to . . . in fact, a good self-help binge could be nice [↩]

Related posts:

  1. 2012 Reading Challenges
  2. Cait’s Reading Challenge Extravaganza!
  3. 2011 Mid-Year Review Pt3
  4. Own But Haven’t Read Reading Challenge
  5. My R&R Reading Challenge