About my Goodreads Reading Challenge

Every year I participate in Goodreads’ reading challenge: you set a goal for yourself to read a certain amount of books and the website keeps track of your process. It’s a nice way to motivate yourself.

Every year I put my reading goal on 50: that’s a nice amount of books, and I know I will still easily reach this goal so there’s not a lot of pressure on my reading. This year I reached 50 books in September, so since then I was just reading what I needed to and not worrying that much about numbers.

But last month my friend Laurens convinced me to set the goal of my reading challenge even higher. “Come on, you have to keep challenging yourself!” Now, I can get a bit competitive, and he reads a lot too, so I couldn’t help put change my challenge to 80 books. And suddenly, I was 6 books behind on schedule.

Now, this doesn’t have to be a problem per se. I have a month and a half to read 17 books to reach my challenge. I can do that. I have a lot of books lying around that won’t take that much time, I can easily make a selection of a few of those to boost my challenge.

The problem is my studies. As a literature student I have quite some required reading and at the moment that involves rereading the complete Ulysses. I’m also doing a course on Gothic literature for which I have to read mostly old gothic books that really bore me: it takes me so much time to get through! So the first three days of every week I’m busy with Ulysses, and the last four days I have to do my other required reading and I almost never finish that on time so I can read something else on the week-ends.

I really fear this might be the year I won’t reach my reading goal. But, as I said, I’m a competitive gal. So I’m just gonna go and make myself a cup of tea, curl up on my couch with a blanket and a book, and at least make some progress.