2020 Reading Challenges Report

This last year has been one hell of a ride for many reasons. I will not reflect about things that are not closely related to books and my reading experiences because I would like to keep the tone of this blog positive and hobby related as much as possible. With this in mind I want to go over the many reading challenges and reading opportunities I concentrated my reading on.

2020 has been a year in which I have started to more actively participate in all sorts of reading challenges for the very first time. I have participated in seven different reading challenges through the year. Most of these I finished with great success and learned a lot about my own reading habits and capacities. In addition to these I had a personal reading challenge I choose for the whole year and my usual TBR Jar Draw challenge. Both of these were designed to make me read more of the books I own and read the books from my own bookshelves in particular. In the last quarter of the year I joined a friend of mine on another type of reading challenge on a month to month basis. We liked it an decided to keep it going for as long as our schedules would allow and into this new 2021.

Challenges from month to month

Here are the seven reading challenges I participated in this year:

O.W.L.s Magical Readathon – April 2020

Medieval-A-Thon Reading Challenge – May 2020

Make Your Myth-Taker – June 2020

Olympic Games – June 2020

N.E.W.T.s Magical Readathon – August 2020

Sbooktober Readathon – October 2020

Reindeer Readathon 2020 – December 2020

In order to better track the reading challenges I participate in and to get better organized with them I will be making more room on this blog for them in the form of pages dedicated to them more closely. This will provide me and everyone interested with a better view and understanding of the content provided by my experiences with reading challenges. For this reason I will not delve into detail for all the reading challenges mentioned above.

Personal reading challenges

My long term TBR Jar Draw did not fare well this year. When I first envisioned this personal reading challenge my goal was to make myself read more of the books I own and more books from my own bookshelves; many of which I had for years and have never even started reading them. My initial idea was to draw three book choices from a jar filled with titles of books I own and have not read, and every month I read one of those books while the other two go back into the jar for another draw some other month. In the whole year I have managed to read seven books for the TBR Jar Draw challenge. I ended up sacrificing this challenge in order to pick books that fit into the other reading challenges trough the year.

The total result for this reading challenge actually differs from this assessment. Upon closer inspection and review of the book titles left in the TBR Jar I found I have read ten more books that were in the jar but were not pulled out for the TBR Jar Draw. I picked those books and read them as a part of other reading challenges.

So in short, while I read only seven books due to the TBR Jar Draw, I read another ten books that were in the jar which makes the goal of reading more books I won successfully achieved! This makes for a very nice pile of books from my own shelves that I finally read and removed from my TBR! I am still thinking on changing the format of the TBR Jar Draw to accommodate the reading challenges I choose to participate in and in continuation of reading the books I own at a steady pace.

Personal reading challenge 2020

For 2020 I had also set a personal goal to read thirty books I choose for just this purpose! Some of those books were newly bought by the end of the 2019. and some were on my shelfs for a lot longer than that. By design this was another reading challenge that set me on the same goal to read more of the books I already own but with the actual list of the books! By the end of the year I did not managed to read all thirty books from the list and here is the list in the end:

✔ Six of Crows (Six of Crows, #1) by Leigh Bardugo
✔ Crooked Kingdom (Six of Crows, #2) by Leigh Bardugo
✔ The Fates Divide (Carve the Mark, #2) by Veronica Roth
✔ Prey (Shifters, #4) by Rachel Vincent
– Carniepunk by Rachel Caine (editor)
✔ The Witch With No Name (The Hollows, #13) by Kim Harrison
✔ Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy by Ellen Datlow (editor)
✔ The Cruel Prince (The Folk of the Air, #1) by Holly Black
✔ The Wicked King (The Folk of the Air, #2) by Holly Black
✔ Death of a Darklord (Ravenloft #13) by Laurell K. Hamilton
✔ Carry On (Simon Snow, #1) by Rainbow Rowell
✔ Wayward Son (Simon Snow, #2) by Rainbow Rowell
✔ The Battle of the Labyrinth: The Graphic Novel (Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Graphic Novels, #4) by by Robert Venditti, Rick Riordan
✔ Black Butler, Vol. 3 by Yana Toboso
✔ Kitchen Princess Omnibus, Vol. 3 (Kitchen Princess, #5-7) by Natsumi Ando
✔ Saga: Book Three by Brian K. Vaughan
✔ Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (The Wicked Years #1) by Gregory Maguire
✔ Serpent’s Kiss (Elder Races, #3) by Thea Harrison
✔ Djevojka iz noćnih mora (Anna #2) by Kendare Blake ( Girl of Nightmares )
* MOR – Plodovi osvete by Josip Kralik
* The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
✔ Balzac i kineska mala krojačica by Dai Sijie ( Balzac et la Petite Tailleuse chinoise)
✔ Neobičan događaj sa psom u noći by Mark Haddon ( The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time)
✔ The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux
✔ The Borders of Infinity (Vorkosigan Saga #5.3) by Lois McMaster Bujold
✔ The Dark Prophecy (The Trials of Apollo, #2) by Rick Riordan
✔ The Burning Maze (The Trials of Apollo #3) by Rick Riordan
✔ The Tyrant’s Tomb (The Trials of Apollo #4) by Rick Riordan
– Hellboy, Volume 1: Seed of Destruction and Wake the Devil by Mike Mignola
✔ The Darkness: Darkness/ Batman & Darkness/ Superman 20th Anniversary Collection by Garth Ennis, Jeph Loeb, Ron Marz, Scott Lobdell, Marc Silvestri

Out of all 30 books I have finished reading 26 of them. 2 books I started to read but did not finish and I plan on finishing reading them at a slower pace: MOR – Plodovi osvete by Josip Kralik and The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. 2 of the books I did not even start reading: Hellboy, Volume 1: Seed of Destruction and Wake the Devil by Mike Mignola and Carniepunk by Rachel Caine (editor).

Bookopoly TBR Game

This is a project I started with a reading buddy in September 2020. After having fun with it for the first time we diced to continue with Bookopoly TBR game on a monthly basis. It makes us both happy and keeps us connected in a bookish way. After just four months we had some awesome experiences with this TBR game and like the creative outlet it offers in our reading choices. Here are the posts related to the Bookopoly TBR Game so far:

Bookopoly TBR game – September and October 2020

Bookopoly TBR game – November 2020

Bookopoly TBR game – November and December 2020

Reading in 2021

In my reading plans for 2021 I feel a lot more comfortable with my ability to fit the books I already own into other reading challenges and I will forgo making lists of particular books to read. I will continue to enjoy different reading challenges and let my reading experience differ from month to month in new and exciting ways. I did make a rather optimistic 2021 Goodreads challenge update to read 100 books. But that is a topic for another post where I will go into greater detail using Goodreads data to delve more into the books and my reading statistics for 2020.