Last year I read 114 books for my 100-book reading challenge. However, at no point in this challenge did I ever feel particularly challenged and indeed at several times I had quite large gaps between books and still didn’t fall behind.
This year, I really want to challenge myself. I want to read more, I want to read wider and I want to read more diverse novels. As such, on top of my general reading challenge, I have set myself a number of mini-challenges.
My main goal is 150 books. I have managed to achieve this goal before while at University so I am fairly confident in my ability to manage it now.
Of those books, I wish at least one third of them to be by women. Ideally I’d like a 50/50 split but I feel that would limit me too much on some of my other challenges.
I wish at least 10 of these books to be non-fiction. Most non-fiction I read is about history, particularly classical and medieaval European history, and so I’m going to try and be more diverse and read about other countries and other time periods.
I haven’t read many new releases lately due to focusing on trying to clear out my tbr shelf, and so I have also decided that I want to read 12 new releases in 2017 – one each month.
The final mini challenge for myself I picked was to read at least 10 classics. I deliberately set this number quite low as this is going to be very easy to achieve both due to the large pile of classics on my shelf, and the fact I have a bunch of Little Black Classics from Penguin to read. I felt that managing to complete one “mini-challenge” early would be a great boost and I can always increase it later if I feel I’ve read too much.
I do have several other goals revolving around reading X amount of books from various lists (or other challenges I’ve seen online) but I’ll be blogging about those separately.