Expanding My Horizons and Reading Challenges

As I was reviewing my Goodreads challenge from last year, I discovered that I read a lot of romance. Contemporary, historical, New Adult; I read it all. I even went through a phase where I read a bunch of books that I'd read before. Now, none of this is bad. I love a good romance! Romance novels are my happy place. I love happy endings, I love the predictable story lines, I love romance series with lots of characters, I love it all!

However, there are many other books outside the romance genre that I want to read that I never seem to get to. I found myself never expanding my horizons, never picking up anything a littler harder, with a little more depth. And I'm not saying this is a bad thing, either. I know plenty of people who only ever read romance, or sci-fi, or whatever genre, and are perfectly happy, fulfilled readers. So I'm not trying to shame anyone, or say that what's right for me is right for you. I just decided that this year, I needed to stretch myself a little. This is how I ended up committing to three reading challenges in 2018.

I'm hoping to complete the Modern Mrs. Darcy Challenge, the Popsugar Reading Challenge, and Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge by the end of 2018. If I don't duplicate any books, I'll have read 84 books. That's quite a bit lower than the number of books I read last year, but I am looking at some more challenging reads. Also, I'm sure I'll still get plenty of easy reads in as well, so I'm expecting to make my Goodreads goal of 100. And if I don't make that goal, that's okay too.

I've seen some discussion about the reading challenges taking the fun out of reading and making reading more work than it should be, which discourages some people from doing them. My answer to that is that these challenges are what you make them, personally. For me, it's a way to motivate myself to read outside my wheelhouse once in a while, for others, it's work. It really is what you make it. One piece of advice I have for someone who isn't sure if doing a reading challenge is for you: don't take it too seriously. When I was sick earlier this year, and didn't feel like doing much of anything, I plotted out the books I want to read for each challenge task. I chose to do this because I was bored, but you certainly wouldn't have to go that far. I've also already changed my choices for a few tasks, and expect that I'll make many more changes before the year is out. But I don't let it stress me out because while I want to expand my horizons, I still want reading to be fun. So this year, I plan to read some new things, try some new genres, and see where the books take me!