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).