Why I like Annual Reading Challenges
The Reading Challenge is a list of categories that readers choose from throughout the year. The goal is to pick a book from every single category. This year, Mercer County Library System had twenty-four categories, with a bonus twenty-fifth category for the bookworms who can never stop reading. It averages out to about two books a month.
But the year is quickly winding down, and time waits for no bookworm.
The last books I always leave behind on a Reading Challenge tend to be the categories outside my usual reading genre. I’m big into fantasy books, so anything nonfiction typically gets pushed back. They’re never my favorite reads, but I’m always glad I did.
They act as a sort of palate cleanser from all the fantasy books. After a while, I tend to notice a lot of repeating themes and storylines within books if I read nothing but fantasy, and I find it harder to finish a book because it feels like all the others I’ve read.
Breaking up my fantasy with books from other genres is essential for me so I don’t notice those patterns. But picking out a book from a different genre is rather daunting. You may have noticed there are a lot of books out there. And while it doesn’t really matter which one I read, having some direction has always been a big help so I don’t sit amongst the shelves for days trying to pick one.
Enter the MCLS Reading Challenge. This year, we had categories like ‘Read a Memoir,’ ‘Read a book about Business or Finance,’ ‘An animal in the title,’ and so on.
It is challenging to follow the categories, sometimes, since they can be wildly outside my reading comfort zone. But it also leads me to books I would never pick up on my own. For instance, one of the categories this year is ‘A book that was translated’ so I read Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura. It’s about students in Japan and their struggles with school and mental health, and from the description alone it probably isn’t a book I would have read without some prompting.
It ended up being one of my favorite books this year. There were some fantasy elements to the book, but by and large it was more about these students finding friendship and strength with each other. The fantasy was very minimal, but it didn’t need magic and sorcery.
I still have a few categories left to read by the end of the year, and even though they’re not my favorite categories, I’m excited to see what books I can find for them. I’m even more excited to see what categories will be on the 2025 reading challenge!
You can view the 2024 challenge here: https://mcl.org/events/reading-challenge/
Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura, 9781645660408
Other translated novels to fill the category:
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami, 9780307593313
One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez, 9780060883287
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez, 9780394561615
A Man Called Ove by Frederik Backman, 9781476738017
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, 9780307269751
-Lydia, Administration
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