How did I miss these?  Reading was never a challenge but a pleasure, and forced lists seem counterintuitive. But when a friend sent me a reading challenge from a library in her neighborhood, I decided to find out more about reading challenges. Maybe because it’s the season of New Year’s resolutions, but google gave me over a hundred varieties of reading challenges for the year – from  “traveling the world in books” to “reading the classics” and award winning books.

The Provincetown Library Reading Challenge  offers a prize if you finish all their categories, and I am tempted to sign up – if only to fly out to Massachusetts to pick up my reward.  If you need a little incentive to read this year, you might consider one of the twelve possibilities they recommend.  A few appealing to me include:

1. a book you can finish in a day
2. a book published before you were born
3. a book that intimidates you
4. a book you previously abandoned

My own reading challenge might include:

• one of the many unread books that have been gathering dust on my shelf for years
• the Newbery Award winner for this year (but I would read that anyway so it may not be much of a challenge
• a book recommended to me by someone I suspect didn’t really read it
• a book from college years that I decided I didn’t need to read back then
• a book about a place I will probably never visit
• a book set in a place I want to go back to
• a book that will never make the bestseller list
• and, in honor of Provincetown, read Hugh Nissenson’s The Pilgrim

Do you have a book challenging you this year?