2024 Reading Challenges: A Plan

Posted on by kellyvincent

I’m going to get back to doing reading challenges again, so I thought I’d share my plan with you. I’m going to do three this year: Goodreads (total books read) and Book Riot’s Read Harder Challenge (24 books in specific topics). In the past, I’ve done King County Library’s 10 to Try, or 10 books meeting specific criteria, but they don’t have it up yet and may be revamping their challenges, so I’ll do whatever they put up. I’ve actually already made progress on the Reader Harder and Goodreads challenges, so I’m off to a good start.

Goodreads

For Goodreads, I set it to 120 for 2024, basically allowing for reading 20 picture books and still reading 100 non-picture book books.

Read Harder

For the Read Harder Challenge, here are the 24 categories and the books I plan to read (as of now):

  1. Read a cozy fantasy book - The Cat Who Saved Books: A Novel by Sosuke Natsukawa & Louise Heal Kawai - Legends & Lattes is the book that brought cozy fantasy into pop cultural awareness, and I was going to pick that until I saw a book about cats and books on a list (I mean, duh)
  2. Read a YA book by a trans author - X by Davey Davis - I had this on the shelf next to me, a dystopian story by a nonbinary author
  3. Read a middle grade horror novel - Ophie's Ghosts by Justina Ireland - the author of the YA Dread Nation series (so good) has this MG, so I thought I’d try it
  4. Read a history book by a BIPOC author - Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson - this sounds freakin’ fascinating so I picked it even though it’s over 500 pages
  5. Read a sci-fi novella - All Systems Red: The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells - a friend recommended this series to me a while ago, so I’m finally going to try to read it
  6. Read a middle grade book with an LGBTQIA main character - The Deep & Dark Blue by Niki Smith - the same friend also recommended this, so here I go …
  7. Read an indie published collection of poetry by a BIPOC or queer author - okay, I’m going to admit this will be the last thing I will read, and only if it is literally the only thing left to complete the challenge, because I don’t like poetry, and I finding reading it anxiety-inducing - if the lines are longer, like closer to page width, it makes me less anxious, so hopefully I can find that
  8. Read a book in translation from a country you’ve never visited - probably Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez & Gregory Rabassa (Translator) - I loved A Hundred Years of Solitude in high school, so I’ll try another of his (I feel like I might have read something else a long time ago, but I don’t remember)
  9. Read a book recommended by a librarian - "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People by Aubrey Gordon - a topic of interest to me
  10. Read a historical fiction book by an Indigenous author - Maud's Line by Margaret Verble - this is set in 1928 Oklahoma (interestingly on the Cherokee reservation, which is near Osage land—I think adjacent—of Killers of the Flower Moon fame, and in a similar time period)
  11. Read a picture book published in the last five years - I’m not going to commit to one, as I’ll just read what I feel like at the time
  12. Read a genre book (SFF, horror, mystery, romance) by a disabled author - The Art of Saving the World by Corinne Duyvis - a YA sci-fi that sounds cool
  13. Read a comic that has been banned - This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki & Jillian Tamaki - a YA graphic novel that sounds cool
  14. Read a book by an author with an upcoming event (virtual or in person) and then attend the event - I’ll see what’s coming up
  15. Read a YA nonfiction book - Code Name Badass by Heather Demetrios - a YA history of Virginia Hall, an American woman who worked for the British with the French Resistance in WW II (I already read an adult history about her, but it was a great story so I’ll try this one)
  16. Read a book based solely on the title - Charming as a Verb by Ben Philippe - a YA about an overly charming boy and the girl he can’t charm (I like her already)
  17. Read a book about media literacy - Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble - I conveniently already had this and it’s one of my high-interest areas, data science ethics, so yeah
  18. Read a book about drag or queer artistry - No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics by Justin Hall (Editor) - new to me, but looks interesting
  19. Read a romance with neurodivergent characters - Act Your Age, Eve Brown by Talia Hibbert - I loved the first two books in this series and already have this one, so it will be great to finish it off
  20. Read a book about books (fiction or nonfiction) - The Book by Amaranth Borsuk - this is one of those little books in the Essential Knowledge series from MIT Press about very specific things (I’ve read some others and conveniently had this one the shelf next to me)
  21. Read a book that went under the radar in 2023 - still need to find one for this
  22. Read a manga or manhwa - Cat Massage Therapy, Vol. 1 by Haru Hisakawa - I’d already started this this week, so I’ll finish it and count it
  23. Read a “howdunit” or “whydunit” mystery - Clark and Division by Naomi Hirahara - a thriller set in post-WW II America with survivors of the Japanese detention camps in the west
  24. Pick a challenge from any of the previous years’ challenges to repeat - A challenge from 2021: Read a nonfiction book about anti-racism - White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo

Summary

So that’s the plan so far. I’ll add a KCLS one when it comes out. And I’m feeling good about this year, and I’m already off to a strong start with four books already finished and (of course) several in progress.