Top Ten Tuesday: Reasons why I love reading challenges

Hi there! Today is time for another Top Ten Tuesday, a meme created by The Broke and the Bookish. The given topic was pretty free – Top Ten Reasons I Love X – so I decided to share with you my love for reading challenges! I know many people find them restraining or boring, but I just love participating in them. Who knows? Maybe I’ll change someone’s mind by listing all the things I like about them. Let’s check them out:

1. They’re really fun!

I just have a great time doing reading challenges, mainly for all the reasons I’m listing here. I always get excited when I join a new one, whether it’s a yearly challenge, or a shorter one (like the current Tome Topple Readathon), because I have a goal to look forward to. It’s motivating.

2. They push your boundaries.

Reading challenges make you read faster, more, and things you wouldn’t normally pick up at a certain moment (or ever). This way, you get to discover new things about yourself as a reader, as well as new genres and different books.

3. They shake up your reading habits.

I’m a one-book-at-a-time type of gal, but every time I join reading challenges, I end up picking two or more books simultaneously. Just by doing that I know I’m doing something different and it makes it fun.

4. They inspire you to read more.

As I said before, when you do a challenge it means you are meant to surpass your normal reading goals, maybe by reading more pages, maybe by reading more books, but it can also mean reading more books of a certain kind – like reading just LGBTQIA+ books for Pride Month or reading just horror novels in October – getting to know more about that genre that you always want to read but normally don’t have the time to.

5. You get to share an experience with other readers.

Thanks to social media you can participate in a ton of reading challenges with people from all around the world and talk about it with them. I love getting to know how other people are doing and what books they choose.

6. You find new things to read.

When I participated two years in a row in a Goodreads group reading challenge, I had to pick up books from a lot of different genres and among them was True Fiction. I had never considered even trying out that genre, but for the challenge I reached out and read two of them. Guess what? I actually really liked them. It was something completely different to anything I had ever read and I learned many interesting things, like how the judicial systems of other countries tend to work.

7. You get to create cute charts to keep track.

I know this one is quite silly, but I really enjoy that kind of stuff. I love being able to see my progress on the page of a notebook or in a graphic made in Photoshop because it motivates and encourages me a lot. It’s really rewarding seeing it after you achieve your goals!

8. They can help if you want to get out of a reading slump.

Though I’ve made my case in defense of reading slumps, I know a lot of people don’t want to welcome them like I do and choose to fight them. Reading challenges are a great way to do that! You get inspiration to pick up different types books and you get people talking about it all around you, so you can’t help yourself to feel encouraged and do the same.

9. They make you pick books you are afraid of.

Taking again the example of the Tome Topple Readathon, I am normally scared to pick books that are 500+ long. Thanks to this reading challenge, I finally got to start reading The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell, which has been on my TBR for quite a while.

10. They are rewarding.

After you’re done with a successful reading challenge, you feel great and inspired to read even more! It’s so rewarding having made it till the end and having read so many things with the company of other readers, that you want to keep participating in other challenges.

Do you like reading challenges as much as I do? What did you pick for today’s Top Ten Tuesday?