You all should know by now that I love my reading challenges. I love making them, seeing how far I get in a year, what comes easily, what doesn’t. Truthfully, I don’t know why. But I love learning new things and challenges help to keep me focused. This year I am excited to start a quarterly meetup for my reading challenge friends, so we can trade book ideas and have a little accountability and encouragement to stay on track. We shall see how it goes! I think it will be great!

2024 Reading Goals

My reading goal for this year is basically split into 3 different challenges: a basic number goal, educational 5×5 challenge, and trying to follow along with the Literary Life reading challenge.

The number goal is the simplest. I read 132 books last year, and mostly felt like that was pretty easy. I definitely wasted more time than I spent reading! So my goal for this year is 140. I’d really like to hit 150, but going to keep it at 140 and try to focus on quality over quantity. (ha!)

5×5 Challenge

The 5×5 challenge is an educational reading challenge hosted by Schole Sisters. (You can read about it on their site here.) The basic concept is that you choose 5 categories in which to read 5 books for your personal education. I usually end up with at least double the books in one category or another, but I really love the idea of picking subjects to focus on. This year my categories are Music, Home Education/Making, Writing, Pre-Reads, Classics.

For most of the categories I have a few books to start with, and will find more in the subject as I finish what I have. For music, I’m studying music theory (old college textbook), biographies of of great musicians (starting with Bach and Beethoven), and music history.

Pre-reads is part education for me, part preparing for our next school year. 8th grade is coming up, and the AO Year 8 Booklist is not for the faint of heart. I’m excited!

Home Education and Homemaking is a general category to cover my growth as a teacher and homemaker. This is one of my favorite categories, and I always end up going a little overboard, but it’s a great subject!

Writing is pretty self explanatory. I’m studying writing for children, novel-writing, and poetry.

Last but not least is my Classics category. My general goal is to read at least 2 russians, a shakespeare play (outside of what we read for school), at least 1 Dickens, and Locke’s Behemoth on Human Understanding. Did I say Behemoth? I meant “Essay”, but it’s a thousand pages and I think Behemoth is a better description.

Literary Life Challenge

This is a new one for me. Full disclosure, I’ve “followed” this challenge for about 3 years now and never actually completed it. So it may just be a total bust. But the category this year is ‘Book of Centuries’ and it sounds right up my alley. The basic concept is that you read a couple of books from each century from 1400-2000, plus categories of early middle ages, Bible times, ancients, and mythology. It can be fiction, nonfiction, biography, poetry, etc. You can view the printables here. I think there will probably be some overlap with my 5×5 challenge, which may help me out, or not.

Anyways, that’s what I have on the books (Get it? On the books? ha ha ) for this year. Do you like to organize your reading with challenges and goals? What do you hope your reading year looks like in 2024?