The 2016 Pick Your Poison Reading Challenge

Sometime early last year (or late 2014) I saw a 2015 reading challenge. Anyone who knows me knows I love to read. When I was a teenager I would often read a couple books a night (much to my father's dismay) and while I no longer have that luxury, I still love to settle down with a good book as often as possible.

One thing I've found recently, though, is that my tastes have changed, and new genres are out there, and some of the genres I loved really don't exist anymore, so I've been a little frustrated finding things I want to read. Stuck in a rut, really, with a fairly narrow mind about what genres to pick up, and often I've found the books to be poorly written or uninteresting. A book challenge sounded like an excellent way to get me out of the rut. I printed off the graphic and left it on my desk at work.

Around about October I was cleaning off my desk and found the book challenge printout and thought, "Bummer. I was going to do this." Then I started looking at the list and realized that I'd already read books that would qualify for a good bit of the challenge. So I buckled down and started a reading marathon and managed, just barely, to finish the challenge. Whew.

Immediately I started thinking about 2016, and looking for challenges to keep me going. One was too long. One was too short. One had multi-levels, but tended to be all on the same topic.... I was beginning to feel like Goldilocks stumbling around in the three bears' house. (Anyone interested in checking out some other challenges, this article has some great ones.) I finally decided to take the best bits of all the challenges and put them together into something I thought would work not just for me, but for some of my friends who also were looking for a good challenge.

The result is the "2016 Pick Your Poison Reading Challenge." There are five levels, starting with the Baker's Dozen (a book a month plus one) through the Freaky Reader (two books a week baby!). Topics are arranged in groups in order to push you a little out of your comfort zone, so that you can't read 4 children's books and skip the 500 page monstrosities. And because just about every challenge I saw had at least one topic that was a real doozy, I decided to include a couple of wildcard topics to help you out.

So here you go.  The 2016 Pick Your Poison Reading Challenge.

A printable pdf is available here for your convenience.

I will be trying to blog about some of the books I read--probably not all, as I'm gonna go for broke and try to do all 104 (it is my challenge after all).  But feel free to check back to see how I'm doing.

Super Awesome Special Thanks go to my friend Good Karma for helping with the fonts and layout of the final challenge and for suggesting some topic changes to replace the ones I made while brain dead. You should totally check out her shop here! And of course, thanks to the whole Cafe gang at Creative Breakroom for putting up with my stress and shenanigans while I was putting this together.