The 2025 Reading Challenge

How a camping trip helped me to find my next reading challenge…

I try to read a diverse range of books, and I have a bad habit of buying/ acquiring books faster than I can read them. For the past few years, I’ve been reviewing everything I read over on Goodreads – follow me there to see exactly what I read as I go. Usually I manage to read around 40 books per year.

This week, as I was finishing the memoir ‘Finding Freedom’ by Erin French – review here, which was the first book I started this year, I happened to be away camping for a few days. I had brought with me three books to choose from to read next. I noticed that one of the three had a common word – ‘freedom’, and that gave me the idea for the 2025 reading challenge. The idea is – I choose the next book to read based on a common word with the previous book I read. I’m hoping this will lead to some diverse reading choices.

I jotted down a few rules of the game as follows:

1. The title of each book read must have at least one word in common with the title of the previous book.
2. Words can be any (including prepositions, indefinite and definite articles, personal pronouns, title, verbs, proper nouns, numbers or symbols, etc.).
3. Single word books are permitted (although this will mean three books in a row using the same common word).
4. Single word titles comprised of compound nouns, particularly where these have been expressly invented for the book in question, such as ‘Hollowpox’ or ‘ Silverlode’ may be treated as separate words for the purpose of this exercise; ie. ‘hollow’ or ‘pox’ or ‘silver’ or ‘lode’ may be used as the common word.
5. Abbreviations may be equated with the word written in full in another title, eg. USA could be equated with ‘United States of America’ in a separate title.
6. Whole numbers can be treated as equivalent regardless of whether they are spelt with digits or in words. Eg V2 and Between Two Kingdoms would be compatible matches.
7. If necessary, word roots may be considered equivalent, regardless of endings. e.g. ‘Cleaner’ can be equated with ‘Cleaning’.
8. Where possible, I will read off my ‘to read‘ list and piles.

I have consolidated my digital ‘to read’ lists into this one list here (in no particular order) which I will keep updated this year as I read off it. My digital list has nearly 200 books on it, and I have other books not yet added which are scattered around the house! As I go through the year my goal is to reduce the number of books on that long, long list.

This does also enable me the challenge of navigating to some particularly obscure books on my list. If you have any books from the list you’d like me to try to get to, let me know!

So my next read will be ‘Freedom from Anxiety’ by Paul McKenna. A self-help book. Watch this space for periodic updates on how I’m getting on with the challenge!