I acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the ACT, the Ngunnawal people. I acknowledge and respect their continuing culture and the contribution they make to the life of this city and this region.

Wednesday, January 06, 2016

Reading Challenges 2016

For the last 3 years I have participated in the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

This year I will continue participation and am committing to Franklin level.  I will be reading 10 books by Australian women writers.  Should be easily achieved as I've managed 21 in the last two years.

Now that the wedding is out of the way and all of the organisation and creation that went with it, I'd like to do more reading.  To this end, I'm doing not one, but 4 reading challenges this year.

On Goodreads, I've committed to reading 30 books this year; or 0.6 books a week.  Combining traditional reading with audiobooks, this should be achievable.

Then there's the Book Riot Read Harder 2016 Challenge and the Popsugar Ultimate Reading Challenge.  Both of these challenge the reader to go beyond their usual genre or preferred reading habits, and read a bit more diversely.

I've created a not very pretty bingo card with mashes the challenges up.  And I fully intend double, triple or quadruple dipping.  As long as I read 30 books this year, 10 of which are by Australian women, I'll be happy.  The rest is a bit of fun to keep me thinking.







AWW Challenge 2015 - roundup

In 2015 I committed to reading to Miles level (6 books) in the Australian Womens Writers Challenge.

21 books read - smashed it!  This was my 3rd year participating and I've have valued greatly the focus of the challenge and supporting local women authors.  To see the books I've read - check out my Goodreads AWW 2015 Shelf.

My favourite was the short story collection of Maxine Beneba Clark, Foreign Soil.

The Challenge was set up to help overcome gender bias in the reviewing of books by Australian women and encourages readers and bloggers to read and review writing by Australian women.

I am not a confident reviewer but I gave it a go for some of the books and contributed many of them to the Libraries ACT Facebook page.  

Reading time is the first to go when I get busy, preoccupied or stressed.  And while all of those things happened this year, I also had a couple of weeks away for work which gave me a heap of plane and hotel reading time.

I'll be doing the Challenge again this year.  But that's another post.