Most of us readers know what a reading challenge. Many of us are familiar with the one we set through Goodreads, but many readers also set personal reading challenges.
As much as we may not like to admit it, there are pros and cons to reading challenges. The pros and cons are what this post will focus on.
Pro 1: You have a goal to strive for. Setting a reading challenge, whether it's a yearly goal or reading a new genre, it allows you to try new things or do better than a previous time. And you set a standard for your reading.
Pro 2: You can inspire yourself to read more. Setting a reading challenge can encourage you to try to get more books read in a year, and even a month.
Pro 3: You're intentionally reading. You're not reading for any other purpose other than to read and make your goal.
Pro 4: You're opening yourself up to a more diverse selection of books. By setting a reading challenge, you're, in a way, forcing yourself to look into more books to read.
Pro 5: Reading can help relieve stress, so having a reading challenge can remind you to sit down and read.
Con 1: It's hard to differentiate between reasonable and unreasonable reading goals. And reading goals that count as "reasonable" or "unreasonable" change from person to person.
Con 2: Reading challenges often don't take reading slumps into account. Reading slumps happen to the best of us, and they can seriously derail our reading plans.
Con 3: Sometimes, you're reading just to reach your goal, and you're not really enjoying the book or taking in its information.
Con 4: You don't always enjoy the books you read, and sometimes even DNF books. Depending on where you were in the book you DNFed, should you count it? (This will be in an upcoming post.)
Con 5: Reading challenges can cause a lot of stress. If you've set what ends up being an unreasonable reading challenge for you (Con 1), that can end up stressing you out in the end.
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