A How-To Guide to Read More & Take on Your 1st Prompt-Based Reading Challenge

January of 2020 will mark my fifth year of doing book challenges and actively diversifying my reading. Since 2015, I have read 460 books which include novels, graphic novels, audiobooks, cookbooks, poetry chapbooks, you name it. If it is considered a book in some form or fashion, I count it towards my reading goal for the year. I believe that if you put time into absorbing the information (regardless of the medium) then you should count it towards your personal goal.

First and foremost, your reading life is yours and whatever "rules" you set to help yourself read more are just that. YOUR rules. You are reading to better yourself and hopefully the world around you, but if you aren't enjoying your independent reading time, what's the point? Some folks don't believe that graphic novels or audiobooks should count. Personally, I don't think it matters as everyone absorbs information differently. For example, I noticed that I prefer to listen to memoirs when they are read by the author as I love to hear their intonation while telling their story. So you should count anything in the form of a book towards your reading goal each year. You put the time to it, so don't leave it off.

A few friends have asked what drives me to continue to track my reading and to set these reading goals each year. I realized around 2015/2016 that, while I was doing pretty well at diversifying my reading on my own, I could still use some direction towards reading books that I might let pass me by. As much as I love a lot of my Science Fiction and Fantasy authors, let's be real, the majority are straight white men and women. That's not to say that I wasn't reading books by authors of diverse backgrounds already, I just felt as though I wasn't reading enough of them.

Solving this equation became easy upon the discovery of Modern Mrs Darcy and her yearly reading challenge. From there, it just grew as you can see in some older posts of mine from 2016, 2017, and over on my Goodreads Profile. I did an introductory post for 2018, but that was the year that I started tracking things exclusively on Goodreads and on a Google spreadsheet. As much as I want to keep the blog updated on my current reads, sometimes there's so many updates (and not enough time) that it's easier to just keep the ongoing spreadsheet. This continued on in 2019 when a Book Riot contributor provided a great spreadsheet for tracking reads. Book Riot has a new spreadsheet for 2020, but it doesn't include a page for the Reading Women Challenge, so I just retooled the one from 2019.

In the realm of tracking, the geek in me enjoys the data that the aforementioned spreadsheet has given me over the year from the number of books I read per month, how many hours I listened to audiobooks, sources that I obtained my books from, and more. It's really a great setup. Aside from the spreadsheet, I keep my overall reading list on my Goodreads profile as it's a bit easier to access and see the big picture than looking at the spreadsheet. You can track your books in a similar fashion or you can just challenge yourself to read more without tracking it. Honestly, whatever works for you in your reading life.

If you do plan to track your books and to do challenges with prompts, it definitely behooves you to put in time for some research. I've usually left it for the beginning of the year, however, both Book Riot and Reading Women released their challenge lists around the beginning of December 2019. This allowed me to retool the spreadsheet from last year and start placing some books that I'd like to consider. I have found that I love paging through the Goodreads groups for both challenges. You can find them at Book Riot and Reading Women. There are sections for each year of the challenges and within those sections, each prompt has it's own topic for discussion. I have found many great suggestions within these forums from fellow readers. Book Riot posts articles for most of its prompts with book suggestions that are easily searchable on their site. These challenges might not vibe with you and that's okay, there's a TON of different book challenges all across the web. Find the one that suits you.

Don't forget to include books that you want to read in the midst of all of this. You might get to a point in the year where your challenge feels more like homework than it does fun. The best way to break it up is with a book that you might be looking forward to releasing or something that you might read with a local book club. For example, I have been hooked on the Thrawn stories in the Star Wars Expanded Universe. I've purposefully made room to read each one as it has released over the past few years.

I have a love/hate relationship with book clubs. I want to be more involved with them, but I don't always want to read everything that they are reading nor do I have the time with my meticulous planning. In any case, I do keep up with a few book clubs and will attend as I can when I read the books they've chosen.

For folks local to Jacksonville, we have a number of great local book clubs to consider. One of my favorites is hosted by Babes Who Hustle. While I didn't make it to more than one meeting in 2019, I loved the one book that I read and then discussed with a packed room full of local and engaged women and LGBTQIA. The Book Club coordinators come up with a list at the beginning of the year. You don't have to read every single book, but it would make more sense to do that than just show up. Last year, the only book that I was able to squeeze in with my planned reading was Michelle Obama's memoir. In 2020, there's, at least, half the books on the list that can fit in with my challenges and I'm going to strive to read those books for those prompts.

Now, you've got a short list of books that you want to read for your challenge. Where do you source them from? The easy answer is just to buy them online, but as someone of limited means, I wholeheartedly suggest checking with your local library. I'll use Jacksonville's as an example. Pro Tip here: try to do your browsing and searching via laptop or desktop vice on your phone. If you're just looking to download something real quick or check your holds status, it's fine to browse via mobile. For a search or general browse that will take longer than a few minutes, it's much easier with a real computer. Trust me on this.

Within the Jacksonville Public Library website (JPL), you can browse the entire physical collection of library, place a hold on a book you want and have it delivered to the library of your choice anywhere in the city, place an Interlibrary Loan request, track your holds, and keep up on when your current checked out books are due. On top of the physical collection, JPL offers a handful of great reading apps that any library card holder has access to just by logging into their account. My favorites are Hoopla and Overdrive/Libby. Hoopla has 8 borrows per month and I mainly use it for reading comics on my tablet or phone. The collection of FREE graphic novels that are available on Hoopla is stupendous. It continually blows me away. Overdrive/Libby focuses on ebooks and audiobooks. You can usually download the ebooks on Kindle, if you own one, but in order to listen to audiobooks, you need to have the Libby app. Additionally, there are other apps such as Axis360 and RBdigital. I have them downloaded, but haven't played around with them as much.

Once you've expended all effort at the library, there are a few other choices to consider for locating a book. Your first stop should be your local book stores. Obviously, shop at a mom & pop store before heading to Books-A-Million. On the Internet, there are endless choices of storefronts to buy books. Amazon will always be a stop for me solely because I have a Kindle and Prime Reading, as well as access to different book sales where ebooks will go down to as low as $1.99. For a semi-independent book site, I am a fan of BetterWorldBooks. Quite a number of books that I've been looking for recently are rather rare, but I've managed to find affordable copies of these books on Ebay. Lastly, check to see if your neighborhood has a Little Free Library, these are always worth a look through to see what new books have popped up since the last time you checked it.

At this point, you've gathered all your books or you, at least, have an idea of what you loosely plan to read. Maybe you're waiting on some holds from the library or you're deciding on what to read first. In any case, you're ready for the clock to strike twelve so you can get on this journey for the new year. Now, you just need to make time for it. Depending on the book and chapter lengths, I'll read a chapter a night or the equivalent of one issue of a comic (inside of a graphic novel) before I go to sleep. I'm also that person who will gladly take my tablet into a restaurant when I'm eating by myself or sitting at the bar in a local brewery. Wherever or whenever you can fit it in, you just do it.

In 2020, I will be continuing on with the BookRiot.com Read Harder Challenge, the Reading Women Podcast Challenge, and the Modern Mrs Darcy Challenge. I use a few different methods to do these challenges. One of my hard and fast rules is that any book that I read can count for each challenge once. I don't have enough time in my year to have one book for each individual prompt within each challenge. It's just not realistic. However, I don't feel as though one book should count for multiple prompts in the same challenge. You might like to have that double-dipping rule to apply to your reading, though. Like I said, it's your reading life, so do it all by your rules. There's no right or wrong here.

I hope that I have helped in some way to give some insight into my reading life and to give some ideas on how to improve on your own. Please feel free to reach out with any questions that you might have or even if you want to chat over a craft beer. I'm down with that brews and beers life.