Reading Challenges

A lot of bloggers do reading challenges. I am not one of them. I am very much a mood reader, so I can't stick to most of the challenge guidelines. In my entire blogging career, I've only done three challenges and two of those were Goodreads yearly reading goals.

The other one was Rereadathon and Shelf Sweeper 2014, hosted by Shae and Rachel. (My two posts from that event are found here and here.) I did it mainly because I had already dubbed June-August 2014 The Summer of Rereads. I was heading off to college that fall, so I wanted to reread as many books as I could so I could bring fewer to college with me. Participating in RRSS14 was just an added bonus.

But I mainly do the Goodreads reading challenge. I didn't do it in 2013 for some odd reason, but I did it in 2014 and 2015 and I'm doing it this year. I know both times I've raised and lowered my goal multiple times during the year (mostly raised, though). I think my original goal in 2014 was to read 100 or 150 books and when I was close to that by, like, May 2014, I raised it until I stopped at 200. I still ended up reading 245 books in 2014. Because of that, I set my original goal at 150 last year and eventually raised it to 250 books. I read 281. (That Goodreads counted; I read more than that, thanks to books I didn't put on Goodreads and DNFs.)

This year, my goal is only 150 books because, as a sophomore who will be a junior, I figured I'd have less time, and I wasn't wrong. So far this year, I've only read 35 books (as of writing this post in early March). I read that many books in January alone last year. We'll see if I raise this year's at all. My reading might pick up in the summer again, although I'm taking another summer class and I hope to have a job or internship, as well.

But let's talk reading challenges. What do you think of them? Are there any you do or have tried?