I had gotten out of the habit of reading for pleasure after college because I felt incredibly burned out on it. That had started to bother me because I used to read as one of my main hobbies. I had seen other challenges that people mentioned like reading a book a week or reading 20 self improvement books a year but those challenges either seemed insurmountable to me based on how little I was reading, or I would quickly lose interest in because I felt like I wasn’t actually reading for me. So last year I set the goal of reading 1 book. That’s it. I did that, and ended up reading a couple others.

This year I set a goal of 5 books and was able to do that by March, but then I ended up with about 9 in flight books and wasn’t making much progress with them. I felt like I had them hanging over my head and it was stressing me out, so I’m now working on the goal of finishing them by the end of the month.

Its been really nice to realize that I still do love reading and that I still can finish a book even with all the stuff going on in life, its just a matter of sitting down and reading. I credit a silly goal with helping me remember that.

This is my first year genuinely participating in a book challenge of any kind, though it isn’t much of a challenge. My goal is 12 books by the end of the year, with the idea being to complete one book a month. It’s just a way to motivate and ease myself back into reading without creating unnecessary pressure

Not typically. I just read at whatever pace I manage.

I moved a few years ago and started a new habit of going to the local used book stores about once a month and picking up 4-6 books that I try to read through before the next trip. I always try to get a mix of genres, fiction and non-fiction, and at least one that is some type that’s not a traditional “story” - poetry, travelogue, journal, religious book, graphic novel, etc.

I’ve found some wonderful and fascinating books this way, along with some duds that get “gifted” away. It also is a good way to motivate myself to keep reading, not get burnt out on any one genre (looking at you high fantasy), and get to know the people at the local bookstores who can give me additional recommendations.

In my experience, external motivation kills internal motivation. I don’t want to be supposed to read this or that amount - I accept any pace and any pauses.

As of challenges promoting something you may not have considered, I do like the idea, though I don’t believe I’ve ever participated in those, except for some self-imposed ones and the one with Ulysses, which I’m not sure whether to qualify as a challenge.

I have a nominal challenge of 52 books in a year on my bookwyrm. It’s really just for the progress bar and for some comparative measure across years. Given my health if I make it to 50% of the target, I’ll consider that a success.

Not for me, I read when I feel like it. I don’t want it to feel like work or an obligation. Sometimes I’ll go months without a book, other times I’m inhaling them like oxygen (went through about 10 books on trans topics in about a week using ebooks from the library awhile back). After suffering Hegel in my philosophy days, everything feels like light reading in comparison lol. As I’ve gotten older, I find I have more of an attention span for informative non-fiction versus reading fiction for pleasure. I scratch my fiction itch with TV/films and video games.

I attempt some amount of hours to be done per month, or per day. Partly, because just saying I have read “5 books” can mean different things. One book can have 1000 pages… Another can have 250… Some I will read in English, there my reading speed is just fine, and some in Japanese, where I read at speed as slow as 1/8 of what I can do in english.

So, I find that, just time itself is enough of a metric. For example, last month I pulled 60 hours, and this month, I am aiming for ~100 Fun times :3

At the same time, if I find that I am growing tired of this, I will definitely go for lesser goal, and have comfy rest.

I’ve recently started setting myself goals. I used to read non-stop before university. During my undergraduate degree I slowed down to finishing only a few books per year. By the time I started my PhD, where basically my entire 9-5 is reading and analysing dense 40-page mathematical papers, I’d completely stopped reading for pleasure.

Last year I set myself a 1 book per week goal and found that I was actively factoring reading time into my daily schedule, which I really appreciated. I managed to get through a lot of my reading bucket list this way, but at the end of the year I decided I wouldn’t set that kind of goal again. I ended up powering through some novels that I would’ve preferred to DNF purely because it was Thursday and starting a new novel would set me back.

This year I haven’t set a hard goal. I’ve decided I am happy with one book per month, and if I’m reading properly then I blaze past that. I’m very much enjoying the ability to augment my main reading with other reading. I’m currently participating in a book club over at !lovecraft@ka.tet42.org which I find very rewarding and I wouldn’t have had the spare reading time to participate in this time last year.

I participate in a book club bit other then that I don’t do any challenges with number of books. I prefer quality over quantity.

I never set specific goals. However discipline is always an important ingredient in any activity that I want to gain something from. So I often push myself to read a little bit more often and a bit more than I would’ve otherwise. But I only read books that I both find stimulating and that I believe contain knowledge that I can gain from.

Wayyyyyy back in the day when I worked in a bookstore I could read about a book a day. I can’t really do that anymore. Was nice when I could!