Are you up for a reading challenge?

If your Facebook feed is anything like mine, for the past week or so you've been seeing lots of your readerly friends post reading challenges or their readerly resolutions. Some of these showed up as friends posted the results of last year's reading challenge on goodreads.com. That's probably the easiest reading challenge there is. Think about how many books you can or want to read for the year. That's your goal. Log your books in goodreads and at the end of the year you'll find out if you reached your goal or not. This year they added a really cool graphic to their report. I've done this challenge for the past several years and as I posted last week, I surpassed my goal for 2016 with a book or two.

I remember last year seeing reading challenge lists that were quite similar to reading assignments I'd given to my fifth graders.

• Read a book about the Civil War
• Read a genre you don't normally read
• Read a book set in a place where you've lived

But these lists were for adults. I gave it some thought and figured if kids can do this, why can't adults. This year I've seen so many more. I sat down to search for the one that I saw last week that I liked more than any other. I must have saved it on my other computer and not on Facebook as I thought. I decided to do a search for "reading challenges." Oh, my. There were many!

There were hundreds! Which one to choose? Should I create my own?

Many of the "excuses" I've seen given for why one reader or another isn't up for a challenge is that there would be too much pressure to try and read to the list. And perhaps the books they really want to read won't fit in.

My idea about these challenges differs from that. Why not select a challenge, one that seems to include books that you might read anyway, and then as you read the books, check off the boxes of the attributes of the books you're already reading. In other words, don't read to the list. But challenge yourself to be able to check off as many boxes as possible.

Make sense?

Now, which challenge to select?