Roll-Your-Own-Reading Challenge

Since completing the Worlds Without End Women of Genre Fiction Challenge last year, along with our respective Goodreads challenges, we've been eager to see what WWE would come up with next. Turns out, they couldn't quite figure it out, so they decided to open the doors for their members to create challenges of their own, or choose ones created by members in the Roll-Your-Own Challenge.

WENDY'S CHALLENGE: This year, I'm trying to keep a focus on my to-read pile which is currently sitting at 600+ books. I don't actually own all of those books, but I do own quite a few, so before I go buying anymore, I really need to look at what's already sitting beside my bed and on my bookshelf. Reading challenges help me maintain that focus, and I have a rule that if I blog about something, that means it has to be done! (Okay it's not a hard and fast rule, but I'm sure going to try!)

Last year I participated in the WWE Women of Genre Fiction Challenge. By default, I'm doing it again this year, because a lot of the books on this list cross over nicely with the other challenges I've chose to do. In fact, the overlap is my excuse for selecting so many challenges. I originally started with three but um... might have gotten carried away:

(1) Women of Genre Fiction. (2) The Book of Ones, which invites you to start a new series. (3) Read the Sequel, which will get me follow up on the many series I've already begun. (4) Fantasia - a leap into the many realms of pure fantasy. (5) Speculative Fiction by Authors of Color. (6) I Just HAVE to Read More of That Author. (7) The Mythopoeic Fantasy Award. This challenge is meant to include only the winners of the award, but I'm altering it slightly to include nominees as well.

With that settled, it's time for me to stop prowling around WWE for more challenges and get busy reading!


MOGSY'S CHALLENGE: Like Wendy, my goal is to chisel away at my leaning tower of books. So while I may have unofficial challenges I'd like to go for, such as the Debut Author challenge where I read twelve novels by authors published for the first time in 2014, my priority are the books in these challenges. The idea is to polish off what titles I already have in my TBR, not add to it.

Much.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun last year with WWEnd's Women of Genre Fiction reading challenge, so yep, I think I'm going to do it again in 2014. Remember, it has to be twelve books by twelve women authors that I've never read before taking on this challenge, which makes me think, heck, this is a reading challenge I'll probably want to do every year until the end of time. After all, there is no greater joy for me than to discovering new authors. If 2014 ends up being anything like 2013, I'll most likely read way more authors and books towards this challenge than these titles I've designated here, which are only the ones shown in WWEnd's somewhat limited database.

Which is why I'm also going to do their 2014 Young Adult Reading Challenge but make my own book list. YA is a category with much to offer these days, and I'm a big proponent of it as you can see from our YA Weekends here. I also love that Nick Hornby quote they used for the main challenge page: "I see now that dismissing YA books because you’re not a young adult is a little bit like refusing to watch thrillers on the grounds that you’re not a policeman or a dangerous criminal, and as a consequence, I’ve discovered a previously ignored room at the back of the bookstore that’s filled with masterpieces I’ve never heard of." So true! So here are the YA titles that have been on my TBR for a while and that I'd like to tackle this year.

 

And finally, I have a very bad habit of starting new series without finishing them. So even though I may be totally overloading myself at this point, I would still like to give it a try. Here's my list of books for the Read the Sequel challenge, which I've decided to put together separately on my own as well.

TIARA'S CHALLENGE:  Last year, much of my focus was reading comics/manga, which I still didn't read quite as many as I wanted to read, but I think I did pretty good. I haven't quite gotten any of my planned challenges fully rolling due to to some work related obligations going on right now, but this year, I'd plan to read as many of the Locus Science Fiction Award and Mythopoeic Award winners/nominees as I can with a focus on the Locus SF winners.

Also, I wanted to read more of the Genre Lit-Flicks books listed (I'm currently sitting at a solid 64% complete) and watch the movie/shows for the ones I hadn't viewed, which is a very few. To help me focus more on whittling down some of my to-be-read pile, I joined a few focused challenges. I have a large pile of books TBR that falls into these categories.

Even though I've read The Hunger Games series, I promised a friend I would buddy read them with her this year. So, I saw there was a challenge for apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic books that included that series called the End of the World Challenge. I've been a little over books in this vein since it seems every books wants to be a dystopia and/or post-apocalyptic. However, there are a few books sitting on my pile that look as if they might be real gems.

As a woman of color, I am often searching for writers of color who write in horror, science fiction, and fantasy, especially if they blend various cultural ideas and beliefs to spin a wonderfully unique and colorful story, so I joined the 2014 Speculative Fiction by Authors of Color Challenge to fit that challenge. Many of the authors I plan to read will be first timers for me.

Finally, I decided to do The Number of the Counting Shall be 3 Reading Challenge, which focuses on completing three trilogies. This way I'll get to knock out a few trilogies that I've been meaning to get around to since the beginning of time such as Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis and Robert J. Sawyer's WWW Trilogy.