What is the best way to illustrate my reading challenge for the year 2021 other than to put a picture of Myne on this blog post, right?

For those of you who are not familiar with the reading challenge, it’s simply a public declaration on how many books you’re planning to read for this year.

I tend to use Goodreads as a place for me to state the number of books I want to read for this year. But if you don’t have a Goodreads account, you can also do the same on the Kindle app.

The only downside of stating the number of books in your Kindle app is that it will only track the books you read on your Kindle app. If you’re like me who used multiple apps to read books and also read print books, it may not paint an accurate number of books you read throughout the year.

If you’re serious about wanting to keep track of the number of books you read this year, then you should get a Goodreads account.

But if you prefer the manual way of keeping track of the number of books you read, then my suggestion is to use Trello. Just split the list into books you want to read, books you’re currently reading and books that you’re already finished, list the title of the books in the books you want to read list column and you’re good to go.

I already did the same last year, in case you’re wondering. If you’re curious about the number of books I plan to read last year, you can read the blog post right here.

How did I fare for the last year’s reading challenge?

If there’s one goal that I managed to achieve in 2020, then it will have to be the number of books I aim to read that year.

Just like the year before, I was able to meet my reading challenge goal which was to read 20 books in 2020.

For some people, reading 20 books in a year isn’t that many considering that there are people who read 100 books in a year.

But for me, 20 books are already plenty enough. It’s already amazing enough that I was able to read this many considering the number of things I have to juggle throughout the year.

And let’s not forget that the pandemic was making it much harder for me to focus on my reading challenge since I had to spend my time preparing for the worst thing to come.

Thankfully, the worst thing I expected wasn’t as bad as it seemed. Things seemed to be getting back to normal about a month or so after the lockdown.

Well, at least from the supply chain and order fulfillment perspective, though. It took me a while to get the books that I ordered from Kinokuniya. But it didn’t matter much to me since the only thing I care about was they had the books I wanted to read. Thus, adding more books to my reading list.

How did I manage to meet my goal for the reading challenge?

If you take a look at the books that filled up my reading list, you’ll see that most of the books that I read are mainly manga. And they’re in many different languages too since I don’t just read manga in English. But I also read manga in Japanese and Malay too.

I won’t deny that it wasn’t that hard for me to meet my reading challenge with manga since it didn’t take that long for me to read one volume. And before you know it, I was able to finish ten books in one sitting.

Of course, the manga isn’t the only book that I read. I also read light novels and nonfiction books too. It’s just that those books don’t dominate the list as much as manga.

Since most of the light novels and nonfiction books that I read tend to be on the longer side, it took me a while to finish reading the book. It’s because of this reason that you don’t see me reading that many light novels and nonfiction books that much in 2020.

Just to let you know that I do aim to read more light novels and nonfiction books for the reading challenge for the year 2021. It’s just that I have yet to decide what books I’ll be reading for this year.

How many books I plan to read for the reading challenge for the year 2021

This year, I’m planning to read around 25 books.

Why 25 books, you ask? To be honest, I don’t have any specific reason why it has to be 25 books other than the fact that I want to increase the number of books to read by the increment of 5.

Since I managed to finish reading 20 books last year, I was thinking of adding 5 more books for this year.

Thus, number 25.

Sure, I can choose the number 21 since it’s a reading challenge for the year 2021.

But only increasing the number of books to 1 doesn’t seem exciting and challenging at all.

Will I be able to meet my goal? I don’t know. But I do know that I probably read just as much as I did last year no matter how busy I am with my work.

After all, I feel the calmest when I read books. If I’m being consistent enough, I’m sure that I will eventually meet my goal even for the long books.

What about you?

Are you thinking of taking part in the reading challenge for the year 2021? If you do, how many books are you planning to read this year? Feel free to let me know in the comment below.

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