How to Create a Reading Challenge You’ll Actually Finish
Spend enough time around book people online and it becomes very easy to believe that everyone is casually reading 75 books a year while maintaining a color-coded reading journal, annotating in six coordinating shades, and somehow still finding time to make sourdough.
They are not.
According to a 2025 YouGov survey, the median American read just two books that year, and 40% didn’t read a single one.
Read five books? You’ve already read more than about two-thirds of Americans.
Make it to ten and you’ve out-read 81% of the country.
In fact, only about 4% of Americans read 50 or more books in a year.
So if your Goodreads goal is 24 and somebody on TikTok just announced they finished Book #103 before Labor Day, please know that's not "normal". They are the statistical outlier here.
Which brings us to reading challenges.
Every January, readers everywhere look at the mountain of unread books they already own and think:
You know what this situation needs? A goal.
Suddenly we’re making spreadsheets. Downloading trackers. Setting wildly optimistic reading targets. Convincing ourselves that this is definitely the year we’ll read 87 books despite having jobs, families, hobbies, and at least three fantasy novels on the TBR that could legally qualify as structural supports.
And then February happens.
The thing is, reading challenges are supposed to make reading more fun. They’re supposed to get you excited about picking up something new, finally tackling the book that’s been staring judgmentally at you from the shelf, or wandering into a genre you normally wouldn’t touch.
They are not supposed to become another tiny source of administrative guilt.
So whether you want to read 12 books this year, 35, 100, or simply more than you did last year, here’s how to build a reading challenge you might actually enjoy finishing.
1. Pick a Goal Based on the Life You Actually Have
There is always going to be somebody on the internet casually announcing that they finished 214 books last year.
Good for them.
We do not know their circumstances.
Maybe they read incredibly fast. Maybe they don’t sleep. Maybe they have discovered some forbidden temporal magic unavailable to the rest of us.
Either way, their number does not need to be your number.
Choose a goal that feels exciting without immediately making you feel behind. Leave room for vacations, work deadlines, reading slumps, unexpected life nonsense, and the inevitable fantasy novel with 900 pages, four appendices, a pronunciation guide, and twelve men named some variation of Arathorn (yes, we're looking at you Tolkien).
A challenge should make you want to read.
It should not make you start calculating books-per-week like you’ve somehow acquired a second job.
2. Give Yourself Permission to Wander
You know when you find a genre you love and suddenly read seven versions of essentially the same emotional experience?
Wonderful.
We support this.
But eventually your brain may decide it never wants to see another morally gray man carrying a sword again (unlikely as that may be).
This is why a little variety can make a reading challenge much more fun.
Try mixing fantasy, romance, mystery, science fiction, classics, literary fiction, nonfiction, even manga — whatever actually interests you.
They don’t have to be evenly divided. There are no Genre Allocation Authorities coming to inspect your bookshelves.
The goal is just to give yourself enough variety that reading still feels like discovery instead of completing an assignment.
3. Make Your Progress Visible
Humans are extremely sophisticated creatures capable of art, philosophy, space travel, and being motivated by stickers.
Especially stickers.
There is something ridiculously satisfying about physically marking a book as finished. Check it off a list. Click "Finished Reading" on Goodreads. Fill in a little coloring book bookshelf. Move the physical book to the "I did that" section of your bookshelf. Write it in a journal. Add a sticker. Move a tiny object from one jar to another.
Whatever gives your brain the YES I DID THE THING chemicals. We like those chemicals.
That whole idea is actually where the Book Trekker came from.
Instead of tracking your challenge somewhere you’ll eventually forget exists, you finish a book and add a literary-location sticker directly to your tumbler. Little by little, it becomes a record of everywhere your reading has taken you.
Which is admittedly a fairly elaborate excuse to combine three things we love: books, stickers, and carrying around an unreasonable amount of water. Because let's face it, too many of us are closer to 80% iced coffee than water.
4. Treat Reading Prompts Like Suggestions, Not Commands
Reading prompts can be really fun.
Until you find yourself forcing your way through a 430-page book you do not remotely enjoy because apparently someone somewhere once decided you needed to complete:
A historical novel featuring an animal on the cover by an author whose name begins with M.
No.
We are not doing that.
Use prompts to get yourself out of a rut or discover something you might not normally choose.
Things like:
- A book outside your usual genre
- A recommendation from a friend
- A book you’ve owned for an embarrassingly long time
- A classic you keep claiming you’re going to read
- A new-to-you author
- A book set somewhere you’d like to visit
- A book chosen entirely because the cover was pretty
That last one counts.
We have all done it.
Sometimes the cover people knew exactly what they were doing.
5. Remember the Books, Not Just the Number
At the end of the year, you probably aren’t going to care that Book #27 helped you remain precisely 54% on schedule.
You’re going to remember:
Oh, THAT book.
The one you stayed up until 2 a.m. finishing.
The one that put you into a reading slump for three weeks.
The book hangovers that you never thought would end.
The one you immediately texted somebody about in all caps because YOU WERE YELLING.
The one that made you stare at a wall for a little while after the final chapter because apparently the author had chosen violence.
That’s the fun part.
Keep some kind of record as you go. Ratings. Favorite quotes. Photos. Stickers. Tiny reviews. A reading journal (we happen to know of one). Whatever you’ll actually enjoy looking back through.
Because the challenge isn’t really about hitting an arbitrary number.
It’s about building a mental Rolodex of characters, worlds, and stories that have transformed your reading life.
6. Change the Rules Whenever You Want
There's always a cheat code.
You made the challenge.
You can change it.
DNF the book.
Swap the prompt.
Lower your goal.
Raise your goal.
Ignore your carefully balanced genre plan and read six romantasy novels in a row because something has clearly happened to you.
Re-read a favorite.
Count audiobooks.
Count novellas.
Count graphic novels.
Count the 1,100-page fantasy brick you hauled around for three weeks as more than one book in your heart if that makes you feel better.
There is no Reading Challenge Tribunal.
Nobody is coming. Well your feral reader friends MIGHT, but that's on them.
Otherwise... You are safe.
The Only Reading Challenge Rule That Actually Matters
Read the giant fantasy novel.
Read the ridiculous romance.
Read the weird little book nobody else has heard of.
Re-read the comfort series for the fifth time.
Abandon the critically acclaimed novel that is boring you senseless.
Your reading challenge does not need to make you a more disciplined reader.
It does not need to make your TBR aesthetically pleasing.
It does not even need to make a meaningful dent in the frankly concerning number of books you already own.
It just needs to give you another reason to pick up a book.
The goal was never to get better at reading challenges.
The goal was to read more books you love. And hey, just know by reading 1 book, you've read more than 40% of the country.
And we LOVE that journey for you.
Turn Your Reading Challenge Into an Adventure
If you like the idea of actually seeing your reading progress build throughout the year, that’s exactly why we created the Book Trekker.
The 40oz stainless steel reading tracker tumbler comes with 40 book-inspired stickers: 35 literary-location stickers for your reading challenge, plus five bonus genre stickers.
Finish a book.
Add a sticker.
Keep going.
By the time you finish the challenge, your Trekker has turned into a little visual map of everywhere your books took you — whether that was a haunted manor, an enchanted forest, deep space, a suspiciously attractive fae kingdom, or yet another small town with an alarmingly high murder rate.
And you remained hydrated through all of it.
