Back at the beginning of the year (which seems so long ago) I made some reading goals which you can read about here. In this post were two main challenges. The first was the goodreads choice awards in which I read the winner (or a close runner up if I had read the winner) of all 20 categories. I finished up that challenge earlier in the year and you can read about my thoughts on the books I read here.
For my second main challenge I decided to tackle the book riot read harder challenge, with 24 different challenges to read throughout the year. I really liked that there were 24 and I took the challenges two per month working my way down the list.
This week I completed the challenge and read books matching all of the prompts. You can see the prompts and the books that I read in the picture below.
There were a lot of very interesting challenges here and prompts that got me out of my comfort zone including listening to audiobooks, reading literary magazines, and niche topics I wouldn’t have thought to think about such as reading books about natural disasters, reading plays, and topics such as romance novels staring single parents.
You can see my full Read Harder 2020 bookshelf on Goodreads here where you can see what I rated everything (except the literary magazine which wasn’t on Goodreads).
I really enjoyed doing this reading challenge and looking at the books that book riot suggested as they had a few book suggestions for every topic on their website, which most of the time I took ideas from.
Some of my favourite books of the challenge were:
Read a book about a natural disaster: A Fire Story by Brian Fies – this was a graphic novel about a man who lost his home in the California wildfires
Read a picture book with a human main character from a marginalized community: Parker Looks Up by Parker Currey – this book was so sweet and love that it was based on a true story
Read a play by an author of color and/or queer author: Kim’s Convenience by Ins Choi. I already loved the TV Show, but I read this the same week I saw the play in person and absolutely loved the full experience.
Read a memoir by someone from a religious tradition (or lack of religious tradition) that is not your own: Unorthodox by Deborah Feldman – this was another book that I saw the Netflix series of this year and I loved seeing the similarities and differences between the two.
Overall I didn’t rate anything under 3 stars which is pretty good for a reading challenge. Now I haven’t yet decided if I am going to do the 2021 Read Harder challenge which you can find here or if I want to do something else (if you know of any good book challenges please let me know).
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