I did the popsugar reading challenge and the goodreads “Around the year in 52 books” for a while.

Popsugar.co.uk will post a challenge with 40 book prompts plus 10 advanced prompts for the upcoming year normally late Nov/early Dec.
You’ll find a goodreads group dedicated to the challenge here

The “Around the Year in 52 books” (ATY) originated on goodreads and the group members vote together for 52 book prompts. One for every week. This is the group https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/174195-around-the-year-in-52-books

Yes! I join a few every year for the prompts like the 52 Book Club and Book Riot Read Harder (the 2024 list will be out on 1 Dec).

Instead of goodreads, join Storygraph. They have a section for just challenges including the two I mentioned above and you can even make some yourself. There are also more stats and you can add page goals.

Just read what you like, at your own pace. I’m probably on the lower end of number of books read, on this sub, (Eight so far this year.) but I read what I’m interested in.

Find the genre(s) you like and read books from them. I use goodreads mainly to track my reading and for a to read list.

I have stopped taking challenges myself.

I don’t want someone to tell me when to complete the book. I want to fall in love with the book and go with the flow.

I now pick books by genre. Currently, I am more into Contemporary books by women writers and Children’s fantasy books. But if someone suggests in this subreddit some other books then it’s worth trying! Reviews here are really awesome. Helps me much better than the Goodreads.

No more rushing for me. I am tired myself.

I personally love reading challenges, but # of books per year stopped being interesting to me several years ago. I used to use Good Reads and I would just set my challenge low so I wouldn’t over think it.

I was looking for more interesting challenges and last year I joined a book club on GR that had a Genre of the month challenge. It was so much fun, but was very awkward to log the books that completed the prompts.

Last year I also switched over to StoryGraph and created my own long term challenge. After importing my data from GR into SG I started looking at the challenges they have. I love how SG has them set up. They are easy to browse and easy to log books into a prompt. I also love that I can see which books others have logged for each prompt. There are 12 categories for the challenges, I really enjoy the genre and geographical categories.

The challenge I created for myself was based on so many posts I saw about “reading the world”. My challenge is to read a fiction and nonfiction book by an author from 195 countries. I’m actually using SG challenges to help me keep track. I’m using 2 nearly identical challenges that list all 195 countries, one is for my fiction books and the other I’m using for my nonfiction books.

I hope you find a more interesting challenge or 2.

Not really a challenge, but I do like to try and read as many books that I’m interested in that are long listed for certain prizes like The Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Jhalak Prize.

r/Fantasy does indeed have the challenge you seem to be looking for. Check the Book Bingo card in the sidebar. If that’s not your genre, I’m sure you can adapt this to feature the type of books you read.

Every year I try to read more than the previous year. The catch is that I don’t check how many books I’ve read until the year is up and I see if I managed. I also compare pages read and not number of books, because I don’t want to encourage myself to read short books just for the sake of finishing more. I look at the numbers of goodreads but I keep track in an excel chart.

Develop good taste and find your own discoveries. If people are just using skin color and gender to promote books then they are using bad criteria. I read plenty of women authors but that is because they meet my criteria, not because of their gender. Seriously I am getting pretty disgusted by the literary curators. I am a reader going his own way.

r/bookclub does an annual book bingo challenge. It gets you to read specific genres, or from a specific decade, or from a specific place. I can’t speak to how useful/achievable it would be, especially if you don’t enjoy having a target number (not sure how many ‘squares’ it takes) but could be good inspiration.

Alternatively, just set a low goal or no goal on Goodreads if you want to read bigger books. For example, last year I beat my target 50, but next year I want to read a few doorstoppers so I’m only going to put 25 or something down. The goal can be whatever you think is realistic. One of my friends had a baby and put 4. Nobody else cares what your goal is.

my kobo has achievments on it like read three different days at a certain time of day, and read all the books you own and stuff, but check out some online reading challanges or join a book club that way you dont have to necessarily pick the books

I’ve been doing an ongoing reading challenge for the past couple years where I try to read a book by an author from every country!

My annual reading challenge had been to read the shortlisted books for the major literary prizes - I’ve come across some great books that I would otherwise not have read, in this way. Bonus is that most of the books are really well written, even if the themes are not immediately relatable.

I do the goodreads challenge because it’s just a goal for x number of books read in the year. Like others are saying, you can create a challenge within the book count that you would be interested in.

Here’s what I try to do every year:

-I try to have a page number goal in addition to book number goal. That way I don’t read like 10 novellas, and make sure I get some longer, denser books in there too. If I really want to focus on page count, I might lower the number of books I plan to read to compensate.

-I try to read a certain number of books in translation, and a certain number of languages. I just got a book translated from Indonesian, and that will be my first book translated from that language, which is cool!

-In March, I try to read only books by women. In February I try to read only Black authors. Sometimes the urge to read books by white men hits me during these months lol, and if that happens I just go with it, but make a note to come back to books by people who aren’t white men at some point elsewhere in the year. I also read books by Asian-American writers, Native/Indigenous writers throughout the year. (To be clear, I read PLENTY by white men lol, I’m not like, completely avoiding books by them or anything, it’s just that their works are already ubiquitous and if you’re not paying attention, or going mostly from 1000 Books to Read Before You Die lists, that’s gonna be most of what you read).

-I try to read both fiction and non-fiction throughout the year. Some years are more fiction heavy, some are more non-fiction heavy, but whatever mood I happen to be in, I do try to make sure it’s a little balanced. I also incorporate poetry.

Not so much a challenge, but more like a food pyramid for books. What do I consider part of a healthy intellectual literary diet? What will feed my mind, and my spirit the most this year? I try to stay flexible otherwise I will just stop reading entirely (I’m prone to a “if you can’t do it perfect, don’t do it at all” mindset) but yeah, you can totally take your own self knowledge and goals and make your own challenge!

I’m doing the goodreads challenge for the first time this year, and I’ve been ahead of schedule the entire time so no issues about that. But I have thought about doing a more interesting reading challenge next year. I want to try to read books from as many different countries as possible, not just US and Europe again and again, and maybe from all decades from 1800 to now or something like that, plus ideally like at least 40% female authors… something of that kind. Also more nonfiction, more poetry, more plays, not just regular prose fiction all the time. I haven’t quite worked out the details, but I think reading varied literature is a more interesting goal than just reading a lot of books cover to cover.