New Year – New Reading Challenge
Every year for the past four years, I’ve hosted a Reading Challenge in my Posse Facebook group. This has been the single-best motivator for me to carve out reading time every month. With a full-time day job, full-time writing, and plenty of family and church activities on my daily schedule, finding time to read for pleasure can be difficult. These challenges, however, hold me accountable, prod me to read outside my usual comfort zone, and help me rediscover the joy of searching for a new book to read.
Despite the word “Challenge,” I design our monthly themes to be as broad and easy to complete as possible. The goal is to have fun, not to get bogged down in stipulations. My readers help brainstorm our monthly categories, and many have mentioned how the challenge motivates them to dig through their TBR piles and read books that have been buried for far too long.
Here is a graphic that outlines our monthly themes for 2023:
As you can see, these categories are broad enough that almost any genre will satisfy the criteria. Even nonfiction.
At the end of each month, I will call for the Reading Challenge report, and everyone will share the book(s) they read to fulfill that month’s challenge. It’s a fun way to learn about new books and find connections with other readers who enjoy the same genre or authors that you do.
We kicked thing off this week with our “NEW” challenge. It’s been fun to see the creativity as people chat about which books they are selecting.
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To celebrate the NEW Year, our challenge for January is to read a book with the word NEW somewhere on the cover. Here are some examples:
NEW can be in the title – Like Emily of New Moon by L.M. Montgomery.NEW can be part of the author’s name – I just started a book by Ashtyn Newbold.NEW can be ancillary text on the cover, like part of a series name, award name (Newbery Medal), or New York Times bestseller mention.There are lots of fun ways to make this work!
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If you would like to join our Posse Reading Challenge, we’d love to have you! Simply click here to join The Posse.
Which monthly challenge sounds the most interesting to you?
If you were to create a theme for one of these challenges, what would you pick?
