How I love cooking up reading challenges and planning a year of reading! I don’t always stick to the plan, but for ardent readers, there is a great deal of pleasure in making reading plans. I’ve decided to join a few challenges in 2015, create one challenge of my own, and commit to 31 titles for #MustReadin2015.
1. Dive Into Diversity is a reading challenge hosted by Reading Wishes and Rather Be Reading. This is an easygoing challenge with no numbers associated with it, and since one of my reading goals for 2015 is to read without numbers, that’s perfect for me. Since I don’t have a specific quantity of diverse books I’m aiming for, my plan is to simply be more mindful about my reading choices–and especially about my reading purchases. I hope to discover new books and authors through the monthly link-ups and hashtag, and I plan to blog about diverse reading at least once a month.
2. Award Winning Books Reading Challenge is hosted by Gathering Books. This is a reading challenge with numbers, but that’s okay. I will probably go for the Platinum Level (35+ books), since picture books count, and I usually read all of the picture books honored with ALA Awards.
3. Nonfiction Picture Book Challenge is hosted by Alyson at Kid Lit Frenzy. I read 120 nonfiction picture books in 2014 thanks to this challenge, and those books constituted some of my very favorite reading of the year. My goal for 2015 is to read at least one nonfiction picture book each week and review it on my blog on Wednesdays.
4. Book Gap Challenge is an idea I’m borrowing from Donalyn Miller. I’m going to tackle just three book gap books in 2015: One Hundred Years of Solitude, Things Fall Apart, and If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler. This challenge will also help me meet my goal of reading more books by South American and African authors, since Garcia Marquez was from Colombia and Achebe was Nigerian.
5. Best of 2014 is a reading challenge of my own design. I want to read a wider variety of books in 2015, especially more books for grown-ups, and since I love all of the annual year-end “best books” lists, I decided to select books from some of those lists for this goal. NPR’s Best of 2014 list alone contains 250 books–more than enough to keep me reading for the entire year! I also love the quirky selections from Brain Pickings and Huffington Post.
6. #MustReadin2015 is a challenge hosted by Carrie Gelson. For me, #MustReadin2015 is all about reading new books that are languishing unread on my shelves. I decided to focus my list on children’s, middle grade, and young adult titles that I purchased in 2014 but didn’t get to (there’s also one lone ARC).
10 responses to “2015 Reading Challenges and #MustReadin2015 List”
I’m teaching “Solitude” this spring for the third time–very curious to see what you think of it!
[…] Elisabeth Ellington shares her 2015 reading challenges and #MustReadin2015 list here […]
I am very excited about your list. I either see favourite titles or books I will be reading this year too! So we can compare notes 🙂
[…] committed to a few reading challenges and a #MustReadin2015 […]
I am eager to read a lot of books on your #MustRead2015 list too. I am planning on reading Crazy Horse’s Girlfriend and I’ll Give You the Sun. I loved Kinda Like Brothers and When I was the Greatest. How it Went Down was very intense and not an easy read, but was so worth it. Have a great time with your list. I’ll likely see some of your reading this year as I am also doing the Dive into Diversity Challenge. Have a wonderful year.
We have some overlap!!! And like I said to Michele, there are a few on here that I had on my list, and then I put others in their places, and now I am not sure if it was the right move. This is so hard!
I like this idea of just being mindful of reading diverse books. As a teacher librarian I am mindful that the library should represent the population of our school, so that leads to reading and collecting as many diverse books as I can. Last year I discovered Tim Tingle. I’m looking forward to reading more of his work this year. Good Luck with all your goals.
Yay! Looking forward to reading your reviews of award winning titles too. I have a few as well in my #mustread list – I thought I better commit to at least a few books. 🙂
[…] 2015, I also made a #MustRead list that apparently never ends. 31 books?! What was I thinking? I didn’t even manage to complete […]
[…] on my Summer TBR list—which didn’t stop me from making a Fall TBR list. And there’s my #MustReadin2015 list, which is mostly filled with books that I somehow didn’t feel like I must read once the calendar […]