The Pros and Cons of the Goodreads Reading Challenge

Hey guys, this is Abi here,

And today I will be discussing the pros and cons of the Goodreads Reading challenge. I just think it's an interesting topic, one of which has many points, which I think are worth discussing.

Let me know in the comments if there are any other points that I may have missed.

Pros

It gives you a goal for the year.

As much as reading is for the joy of it, I always like to try and either equal or raise the amount of books I can try and read in the year. A goal to strive for is a huge motivator for the start of the year.

It's a good tracker for how far behind/ahead you are for your reading goal.

I'm talking about the line under the reading goal stating how many books you're ahead/ behind your target on. You have more of an idea of whether you can relax and pick up a big book, or whether you need to binge on the short stories and graphic novels to catch up. For me, it's fun doing both!

It's a good reference point for posts like "Favourite books of ______" and the "Mid-Year Freakout Tag".

They're also a good reference point when doing posts like these, when you need to select a book for each category, it's good to have a reminder of all the books you might have loved, or even hated in the year. I love doing both of those posts, I do them every year, so the Goodreads Reading Challenge is a good place to start putting together the list of books that I want to include in those posts.

It can be nice to see all that you've read in the year.

It's nice to look at your achievements once in a while. Even though the yearly wrap ups are up at the end of each year, if you click on to the 2019 one, you can skip to the 2020 one, to find out what was the highest rated, the lowest rated, and how many pages you've read so far this year. There's that, and it's nice to see all of the beautiful covers of the books that you've read.

Cons

Pressure to catch up on reading challenge.

This probably just isn't me, but falling behind, and having to read books quicker than what I thought I could, is my worst nightmare. There are worse things to stress about, but I always come up with a Goodreads Challenge that I think I'll be able to achieve, without too much trouble, but a number I'll have to try hard to achieve. So the minute I fall behind, I have to try extra hard to catch up again. But even when you're not behind, there's always that pressure to read more, to make the most of your free time with reading. And that pressure will never go away.

Pressure at the start of the year to read more books than before, or to read as many as your friends.  

I touched up on this in the point above, but whenever I see some of the book counts of my friends on Goodreads, my jaw drops. See, whenever I make a Goodreads goal, I estimate how long on average I'll have to finish each book. For example, 52 books in a year, is a book a week. So whenever I see one of my friends attempt to read 100 books in a year, I can't help but want to try the same, because to be honest, I'm quite a competitive person. I can't help it. But, I just have to accept that I'll never be able to read 100 books in a year, even if they were all re-reads. But, when each new year rolls around, I always watch to aim to be more productive, to read more than what I read the previous year. Let me know if you're the same guys.

Seeing what friends are reading, and wanting to read the same.

I've seen some booktubers struggling with this: the want to always be reading the new releases, when they continue to neglect the books that have been stockpiled in their houses, for years sometimes. As readers, we always want to be on top of the hot new releases, because it's what everyone else seems to be loving. But at the moment I'm trying to get out of that habit, I'm trying to pursue the books that seem interesting to me, myself, and if I'm reading what everyone considers to be the new hot release, then great! But I'm not going to beat myself up if it's not.

Okay! That's my discussion of The Pros and Cons of the Goodreads Reading Challenge! This was a lot of fun to do, and let me know if you want to see more of these discussion type posts in the future because I'd love to do more!

That's going to be it for today, but I'll see you all soon! I love you guys!

Byeeee!

-Abi xxxxxx