Discussion: The Goodreads Challenge & Why It Kinda Sucks

As we have been getting closer to the end of the year, that means that everyone is rushing to reach their Goodreads goal, and that is where my discussion today comes in. The Goodreads reading challenge is a fun way to see how many books you actually read in a year and compare that with your friends, but sometimes that can hinder you more than it would help you.

 A lot of you may know (or maybe not!) that this is my first year doing the Goodreads reading challenge, and since I wasn’t sure how many books I actually read in a year, I decided to go with a goal of 75 because it felt like that was a good place to start to see if I could actually read that much.

So why do I think that the challenge kinda sucks? Well, for one thing, while it’s meant to be a healthy competition between friends it does make you feel like you aren’t reading as much as you should be when you see people who have read 150+ books already this year. When you add to that the fact that I try really hard to blog about the current books and get as much content as I possibly can, it’s kinda depressing to know that I could be doing better.

Another main reason why I think the challenge isn’t really helpful is because for me, it was originally just a way to see how many books I could read. Then it became “well, how many books CAN I read?” That meant that in order for me to read more books, I was reading shorter books just to add them to my reading challenge. For me this has become an issue as I read mainly fantasy which usually means bigger books, which means it takes longer to read them and so there are fewer books being added into my goal.

You may be thinking to yourself that I should just read what I want to read and don’t worry about the Goodreads reading challenge, and if you’re thinking that, you’re completely right! But that is easier said than done when you put that pressure on yourself to read more books to “catch up” to everyone else.

That is why for 2019 I won’t be doing a full Goodreads challenge. What I mean by that is I’ll still set myself a goal, but something a lot lower like say, 30 books instead of 75. While the challenge has been fun this year, it’s also felt like it’s put me under a lot of stress to really get as many books read as possible and that isn’t what reading is about.