Many of you will know of Worlds Without End, a fantastic site dedicated to books in the speculative fiction genre that can be browsed by title, author or publisher. The site also contains a lively forum where members can discuss any kind of SFF-related topic – and not just limited to books, since it involves threads about movies and TV and other media.
One of the most interesting features of WWE is the section devoted to reading challenges: every year a list of these challenges is published, allowing the site’s members to pick the ones they feel most inspired by, or to propose one of their own.
This year – as in previous years – the list is rich and inspiring: just take a look HERE to see for yourselves… I have been intrigued by two: the first a list of the books I plan to read in 2019, with no limitation concerning genre, the other is a sort of promise to myself, i.e. to move forward with some of the series that have piqued my interest with the first or even second book, but that I’ve been unable to see through the end of the cycle.
As you will see, there are several levels to each challenge, with the possibility of adjusting them upwards if we manage to exceed our expectations: I choose 50 books for the Books Read challenge, and 9 for the Read the Sequel challenge. Of course a few books in the first challenge will be eligible for the second one, which might improve my chances for an upgrade in goal. We’ll see…
No matter what, this is going to be fun, so I’m ready to start. Anyone else interested? 🙂
Space and Sorcery 
I am glad that challenges help other people. Anything to get people motivated…
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And there is the added bonus of discovering other interesting titles from other people’s challenges: that is, until I take into account what kind of “damage” that can do to our TBR piles… 😀 😀
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Love to see the challenges, they indeed look fun! I’m afraid that’s all I’ll do with them, look at them and cheer for you 😉
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Thanks! I appreciate the sentiment very much! 🙂
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Oh thanks for reminding me about the WWE challenges! I do the Women of SFF one every year. I’m 100% sure I completed all of the ones I signed up for last year, but I was pretty terrible at updating my progress.
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I did consider the Women of Genre Fiction challenge, as well, but then I noticed that one of the requirement was that the authors had to be new to me, so that might have curtailed my choices… And yes, the updates sometimes tend to fall by the wayside, so I will have to make the extra effort 😉
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I usually do the Women of Genre Fiction challenge. I still need to sign up!
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There is still plenty of time! 😉
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I’ve done the Pick&Mix challenge for a couple of years now. It’s similar to the Books read challenge. But they don’t cover self-published books, so I can’t include everything I read. Of course, there are so many self-published SFF these days that it would be impossible to keep up with them.
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That might be the only downside of the site, but from one of the forum threads I saw that one can request that a particular title be added, so I guess you could enjoy all the self-published books you desire… 🙂
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I love WWE – it’s a fantastic site and I did take part in the Women of Genre Fiction challenge for a couple of years. I’m not as good at keeping up with my self imposed challenges any more for some reason so I tend to steer away. I do feel like I should do something though.
Lynn 😀
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Challenges are fun, not so much because I *need* to be compelled to read (not when you can find me with my nose in a book even during my lunch break!) but because they help you focus on the progress of your reading. And since I’m not doing the GR challenge, I needed an alternative… 😉
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Oh my goodness, I LOVE stuff like this. And I do really, really want to take part because obsessive list making and meeting targets and achieving and getting a pat on the head are all my favourite things. But I have promised myself absolutely no challenges this year. I stressed myself out so much at the end of 2018 because I hadn’t quite finished my Book Bingo and I wasn’t “keeping up”, and I think a year of just reading as and when I want is the best thing I can do right now.
But I’ll be super interested in how you’re doing – keep us updated! I can live vicariously, no? 😀
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Of course! 🙂
What I like about these WWE challenges is that they feel more like a way to list one’s achievements rather than a goal to stress oneself over. After all we are going to read all year long, aren’t we? 🙂
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I think you’ve hit the nail on the head, maddalena. If you want to go all hard core and push yourself you can certainly do that but really we’re just trying to make it fun and easy to track your reading and perhaps get you to consider new books and authors to try. With the levels you can dip into a bunch of challenge themes at the same time which means you really just end up reading what you want anyway but this way you get to play with all the cool kids.
bkfrgr, I get that you don’t want to do any challenges this year but you might consider the Pick and Mix challenge. It’s the most laid back challenge of the lot since it has no requirements as far as choices so anything goes. Start with the 10 book level and bump up if you find you have time for more later. We’d love to have you!
Glad to see so many familiar folks are still enjoying the RYO! Read on!
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Getting to play with the other “kids” is indeed the main attraction of these challenges, not to mention the discovery of new, interesting titles to add to one’s “wanted” list – and if our TBR pile grows beyond measure… well, we’ll take care of it one book at a time…
😀 😀 😀
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That’s true! And a great way of looking at it! 😀
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