2024 Reading Challenges

I’m participating in 13 reading challenges in 2024 to help me tackle my reading goals (outside of my Goodreads goal to read 400 books). Most of these goals are helping me tackle my backlist (books I purchased pre-2024), expand the diversity of my reading, broaden the genres I read, and read longer books.

I’ve separated these challenges into three categories: challenges that are tailored to my reading habits, simple and easily customizable, and challenges hosted by other people. I’ll be updating this page monthly throughout the year to hold myself accountable.

Whether you do 12 books to read in 2024 or 5 books to read in 2024, this list is my “priority TBR” for 2024. I decided to stick with 24 books because I read quite a few books each year, and there are a lot of books that have been sitting on my shelf for years! So, it’s about time I read them.

Last year, I had 23 New Releases for 2023, and while I bought almost all of them, I only ended up reading half. So, for 2024, I decided to focus on 12 new releases with the goal of buying/borrowing them and promptly reading them!

Increasing the length of the books I read has been a goal of mine for the past three years! One challenge that really helped me was tracking all the books I read over 300 pages and aiming for a (reach) goal of 300 books. Last year, I read around 268 books over 300 pages, so I’m curious to see how close to 300 books I can get in 2024!

This is another challenge that encourages me to read longer books! Also, I have so many hefty fantasy novels on my backlist, so this challenge is an extra push to get me to read them. While re-reads do count, this year, I’m hoping to achieve this goal excluding re-reads!

Reading more nonfiction has been a goal of mine for the past few years, but it always seems to be out of reach. I take so long to read nonfiction compared to fiction that I struggle to even pick up a nonfiction book. I’m hoping that this year is the year since I have so many nonfiction books on my backlist.

I love the simplicity of this challenge! It’s another reading challenge that encourages readers to diversify the genres they read by helping them identify five genres they want to read more from. The idea is that you’ll read five books from one genre, four from another, and so on. This year, I’m looking to read five retellings, four books about historical figures, three classics, two books critiquing “It’s a Man’s World,” and one epistolary novel.

Another simple challenge that’s a fun way to keep track of the book titles you read! I remember one year, I found it so hard to find a book starting with “J” that I wanted to read. One way that I make this a bit more of a challenge is not letting myself use books that start with articles (a/an or the) or are re-reads.

Like many other people in 2024, tackling my backlist is a priority this year! And, back to help me is Austine Decker’s Beat the Backlist challenge. While there’s a condensed (24-prompt) version of the challenge, I decided to join the 52-prompt challenge in the hopes of reading at least one book from my backlist per week.

This is my third year participating in BookTuber Kayla’s monthly reading challenge (see BooksAndLaLa on YouTube)! Kayla is interested in seeing the trends of words in book titles change every year; for instance, there aren’t that many recent books published with “secret” in the title (March’s prompt). The rule of the challenge is that each month, you have to read a book with the prompt word/theme in the title.

This is also my third year participating in BookTuber Melanie’s monthly reading challenge (see Completely Melanie on YouTube). For each month, there are two prompts where you must read one book per prompt. The purpose of this challenge is to help you read the books you already own.

I’m super excited to participate in this challenge hosted by The StoryGraph again this year! I’m always looking to broaden and diversify my reading, so the idea of visiting countries through books written by authors from those countries is the perfect challenge for me. This challenge is great if you also want to pick up more translated fiction!

Speaking of diversifying your reading, this is a challenge I discovered in late 2023, and it encourages readers to read books by minority authors across a broad range of genres. The challenge, created by Rebecca (@BooksOnAdventures) and Sam (@reading.and.roaming), reveals how the publishing industry disproportionately publishes “serious fiction” (with hard-hitting themes) and shies away from publishing romances by BIPOC authors and featuring BIPOC characters.

This challenge is a new one for me! Since I’ve recently gotten into historical fiction, I thought it would be fun to track which decades I tend to gravitate toward. The challenge asks you to read books set between the 1880s and 2010s, typically with two decades allocated per month. However, I’m not really using this as a monthly challenge; I just want to see if I hit all the decades in 2024!