Antonia Bernardin

There’s lot of different reading goals and challenges you can set and track to give some reading inspiration and motivation.

Firstly, what do I used to track? I prefer Storygraph because not only is it a lot more user friendly than Goodreads, but you can clearly see books read, pages read, top genres, book format, fiction vs non fiction and more. As a bonus Storygraph is black owned and not owned by Amazon, so things are not biased or paid for.

If you’re on Storygraph, feel free to follow me on there!

1. Books read goal

A simple classic, pick a goal number of books you’d like to read. Make sure it’s achievable but still a little bit of challenge. This is an easy one because if you aren’t a huge reader, it could something as easy going as 6 books a year.

2. Pages goal

This depends on what you are trying to get out of reading. My friend set herself a pages goal because she tended to avoid the larger books in her TBR, so she wanted a goal that would challenge her to read those bigger books.

3. Category of book (I.E. Fiction vs non-fiction)

I am terrible for avoiding non-fiction books, so I gave myself a secondary goal of reading at least one. This is a nice goal if you just want to give yourself a reason to tackle a book you’ve been avoiding.

4. Genres

There’s nothing wrong with sticking in your wheelhouse of favourite genres but if you want to set yourself a goal that’ll encourage you to read outside your comfort zone, this can be an easy way to give yourself a target to make that happen.

5. Bingo boards

Loads of a huge creators on Tiktok and Instagram create bingo board challenges. For example, fantasy focused ones with goals like: read a book with a werewolf, read a book with fae and so on. There are Summer themed ones, halloween ones, genres themed ones and so on. These range from easy to the infamous “Hardest book challenge you’ll ever do“.

6. Format goals

For example, I wanted to read 50 book-books this year (so digital or physical) and then any audio on top of that was a bonus. You can do this as a way to encourage you to clear through the books on your books shelves, or your digital library and net galley requests, or to finally use those audible credits up.

7. Introduce more diversity into your reads

It can, unfortunately, be easy to end up reading fiction written by straight white authors, with straight white main characters, as publishing houses still lean that way unfortunately. So you can set yourself goals, or find bingo boards, with goals that centre around adding more diversity into your tbr, whether that is LGTBQIA, disability rep, books by POC authors or featuring characters of colour or seeking ‘own voices’ (books about culture or set in one, told by people from that culture).

8. Reading challenges

Storygraph has reading challenges you can join

And Goodreads does them too but I don’t know too much about them.

Stay tuned for my goals post where I list out what I’m aiming for, mine are always a little loosey-goosey as I’m a mood reader but that’s the best thing about these Ideas, you can pick something really regimented or be vague like me.