Being Challenged

When I started my voracious reading habits over 35 years ago I had no plan, no strategy for what I was reading. Accidently I had been introduced to SF at an impressionable age and dived into the genre head-first. My first love after all those years is still SF but, as you will have noticed, I read many other things besides Science Fiction these days. Indeed I’d have to say that an almost equal passion of mine presently is Historical Fiction. Like SF it has a huge range and will probably take me decades to exhaust all of the possibilities.

Recently – well about a year or so ago – I was becoming a bit fed up, even bored, with my reading habits. I was generally reading books I had bought recently or those that looked on the face of it like a fun read. I was in other words coasting along and my reading was suffering because of that. In effect I had become a lazy reader. What I needed was more of a challenge – so I created some. It appears to have worked. My reading has become more coherent and I’ve read many really good books that I might have overlooked if I had not had the various challenges I had set for myself. Now that I have completed several, of which more in a moment, I feel the need to push myself a bit more to see what I can do. In that case my self-imposed challenges will become more difficult and, hopefully, more interesting. The over-all strategy was to read 10 themed books initially followed by 5 non-themed to let off some steam and to enable me to read books that don’t readily fit into any theme. I have since extended this theme ‘break’ into 10 books to allow me some more flexibility in what I read.

So far my challenges haven’t been all that challenging. In order of those already completed these have been:

Single Word Titles

A Colour in the Title

Fantasy Books

Off-World Tales

Historical Novels

As I said – overall not that much of a challenge, but I’m only really warming up. Presently I’m coming to the end of my non-themed 10 (with the usual review lag presently running at 6 books) and the next theme will be Future Earth – so lots of SF coming up. After another non-themed 10 it will be a series of Books made into Movies which should throw up some interesting volumes. That little lot should take me up to Christmas, after which I’ll decide what themes to go with next. I have a few in mind already which should be fun. It does all sound a little crazy (if not actually bat-shit crazy) but it does seem to be producing a better class of reading material than picking each book on the spare of the moment impulse. I’ll see how it goes.