Diverse reading challenge: nearing the end of the year

Early in the year, I wrote about the diverse reading challenge I set for myself for 2023. Now, with just under two months to go before the end of the year, I’m starting to look at how I got on and thinking about what I might want to keep or change in setting myself another challenge for next year.

Overall, I’ve had a bit of a slow year for reading. I set my Goodreads goal at 150 books for the year – not as a challenge, but as a number which in previous years I’ve passed easily. This year it is proving a challenge, and although I might make it I’ve got some serious reading to do in November and December (three books a week). That’s okay, though – it wasn’t meant to be a challenge and I’ll just ignore it if I don’t reach it. I’ve done other things, some of which I didn’t know about at the beginning of the year, and some of which (like marking A-level exam papers, examining a PhD thesis, or doing archive research) involve large amounts of non-book reading. For the same reasons, the spreadsheet on which I’m tracking my diverse reading challenge has some gaps. Under the particular rules I set myself, I have to choose which category to file a book under, and I’d have filled more spaces if I let a single book count for more than one category. (For example, a lot of sapphic romances are written by authors who are themselves lesbian, bi, or otherwise sapphic, and would also count for my LGBTQIA+ authors category – but my personal rule for the year has been that six categories need six books and I don’t count them in more than one space.)

Image: some of the spreadsheet in which I have tracked my reading. Months are listed down the left-hand column, and categories across the top. Most boxes contain the author and title of a book, often with a note about how they fit that category. For details about these and all the books I read, I recommend looking at my Goodreads profile.

The categories in which I’ve been most consistently successful (so far – there are still two months in which I could fail to find books in these categories!) are authors of colour and authors working outside the UK/USA. When I designed this pair of categories, I was trying to think of ways to make my reading genuinely diverse: to hear from people whose experiences are different to mine. As a white reader, I benefit from hearing the voices of authors of colour, but I noticed that what I picked up when I browsed in a bookshop or a library here was often authors who were, despite our differences, also quite similar to me: it’s been really good to read books by, for example, a British Pakistani author who grew up in England in the 1990s… but also, we could have been at school together. To keep that but also add other kinds of diversity, I added the category about working outside the UK/USA, because I wanted to look beyond the mainstream of publishing and find other voices. 

It’s been interesting to see what I found in that category – often looking through lists of books I wanted to read anyway, or noticing what I was given which might count. Some places weren’t very far away: the Republic of Ireland and Germany aren’t far away from me geographically, and Australia and Canada have strong cultural connections to the UK and USA. Some of the things I enjoyed most in this category were also in translation, and I might use that as a category for next year’s challenge – the books I read in translation were especially helpful, I think, in approaching the goal of engaging with writing from a range of very different cultures. 

Although they had some gaps, other categories worked fairly well. LGBTQIA+ authors seem to end up on my reading list without much effort, partly because of overlaps of recommending and content interests. (I had a couple of months where I didn’t specifically list any books in this category; but looking around the rest of my spreadsheet, there are at least eight and probably more books which were included in other categories or other months and also have LGBTQIA+ authors – it’s more about my uneven reading patterns than a lack of material.) Having checked that this is the case, I might let this go as a category next year in favour of something more specific, like looking at sapphic romances – which is as much about knowing the market in which I’m selling my own novels as anything else. 

My two academic categories, one about Quaker history specifically and the other for my academic fields more generally, were also helpful – not because they made me find more material (I have plenty!) but because they helped me pace my reading in these areas. Spreading it out, and aiming to read one book a month, rather than saving it all up for a rushed burst when a project is due or waiting for some (potentially imaginary) time in the future when I’ll be able to do academic reading ‘properly’ is a more balanced way to approach this. I might change the specific category to reflect the work I’m hoping to do next year, or make these categories more flexible in some way, but I think I’d want to keep something similar.

I’m also aware of the categories I haven’t included. I haven’t had a category for poetry, for example, and have hardly read any this year – that’s time and whim as well as the challenge, but there’s probably some connection.

So here are some categories I might set myself as challenges for next year:

* in translation
* author of colour
* sapphic romance
* new poetry (published since 2000)
* academic

What’s the best thing you’ve read this year? Did you set yourself any challenges, or do you think you’ll set any for next year? What other categories might work as interesting challenges?