I like to read. A lot.
That won’t come as a big surprise to those of you who have read this blog before. I talk about books a lot. I even worked in a bookstore for nearly five years, and recently started working in another bookstore.
I spend a large portion of my time reading, so it’s appropriate that my first blog of 2015 is about reading.
I have an account on Goodreads and every year I set a reading goal for myself, which the site tracks. This year I failed to meet my goal of 70 books – it’s been a busy year and I only got 55 books read. I think I’ll keep the same goal for 2015. It average out to a little less than 6 books a month, which really isn’t too hard when you factor in how many graphic novels I read.
A few days ago a friend of mine contacted me about adding to that challenge. In addition to reading a certain number of books by the end of the year, what if we also challenged ourselves to read at least one book from a different genre each month?
I was interested in the challenge immediately because while I read a lot, there are a lot of genres I don’t really touch. I tend to stay close to my scifi/fantasy books and only occasionally venture out to read straight fiction, memoirs, etc. I own a lot of books from many different genres, they just tend to get pushed to the bottom of my reading list in favor of the newest Dresden novel, or anything else I might be more interested in,
Therefore, the challenge was accepted and my friend came up with a list, assigning each month a genre.
I briefly considered – for about 30 seconds – reading only from that genre for the month, but quickly dismissed the idea because there are too many good books I want to read to be able to stay within one genre for an entire month.
This list doesn’t cover every genre – particularly as it seems there are new genres cropping up every day. (What is with all this New Adult stuff? Do we really need our own category?) But it’s quite a few of them.
Initially I scoffed at having fanfiction on the list (sorry guys) not because I don’t consider it a legitimate genre (because it is, and it’s growing) but because I just don’t read it. I know there’s a lot of good stuff, and I have some friends who write it, but I’ve never been interested. That’s when I realized that’s exactly why it should stay on the list. If this whole challenge is about trying new things, then I need to give fanfiction a try too.
Along with this list I’ve also personally challenged myself to try to choose books that are already sitting on my bookshelf, never getting read. I have so many that fit each of these categories, now is a great time to actually read some of them. Just looking over the list gets me excited about what I plan to read this next year. I already have books in mind for nearly every category.
If you’re interested in following along with us on this challenge, then check out the blog we’ve set up. There’s currently three of us in on the challenge, and we plan to post updates and reviews along the way.
Not Another Dumb Blonde 