Reading Challenges for 2012 and Total Books Read for 2011

365 Project for 2011

Last year, we started the tradition of documenting the books we read on a monthly basis. Our goal was to collectively read 365 books for the entire year among the three of us. Here is our update for our own self-imposed challenge:

	Jan/Feb	Mar/Apr	May/Jun	July/Aug	Sep/Oct	Nov/Dec	Total
Myra	42	63	30	80	26	43	284
Iphigene	16	24	19	13	15	13	100
Fats	35	9	12	13	35	15	119

In sum, we were able to read 503 books in all!! How amazing is that (for details of book titles we have read, click here)! We shall continue on with this tradition of listing down the books we shall be reading for 2012. You can find some of the titles we have read in January here.We are still aiming for 365 books this 2012.

Reading Challenges

We are excited to start the year right by also participating in a few reading challenges hosted by fabulous book bloggers. Last year, we joined five reading challenges and we were able to reach all our goals for each one of them (do check our round-up post for 2011 here).

Before announcing our carefully-selected reading challenges for 2012, let me invite one and all to once again join our very own Award-Winning-Books Reading Challenge. Sign-ups are still ongoing here, and we’d love for you to come join in the fun, if you haven’t already.

You can use these widgets as well – specially crafted by the talented Iphigene.

And now for the Reading Challenges that we will be participating in (which we hope would likewise overlap with our very own reading challenge):

The Non-fiction Picture Book Challenge 2012 hosted by Kid Lit Frenzy & The Nonfiction Detectives. Our personal goal is to read at least one nonfiction picture book each month for 2012 – that would be 12 books in all. Since we are active participants of Nonfiction Monday, I am hoping that this should prove to be a breeze.

Since we all had such a wonderful time with the Picture Book Challenge hosted by Danielle Smith from There’s a Book in 2011, we are joining it again this year! 🙂 We love the sense of community that we felt from the other participants of the reading challenge who truly take the time out to visit other links/sites and leave beautiful comments too! Their announcement post isn’t up yet, so I am using their widget from last year’s. Danielle’s announcement post is now up here! We’re aiming for the Early Reader level at 120 books just like last year’s.

We also felt that joining the Caldecott Honor Challenge (hosted by LibLaura5 and Anna of A to Z Library) and the Newbery Reading Challenge (hosted by Mr. Schu and Colby Sharp) would be a wonderful way to foster an even greater sense of community with kidlit and YA enthusiasts. And it overlaps perfectly with our very own Award-Winning-Books Reading Challenge. Win-win!

Our personal goal is to read and review at least 24 Caldecott Medal/Honor books this year. We shall have this overlap with our own Award-Winning-Book Reading Challenge.

This is relatively tougher, since we’re talking YA novels here now, and given our bimonthly themes here in GatheringBooks, we’d have to be realistic about how much we can manage to read. At the moment, we are aiming for 12 books.

As per usual we are doing the Reading-the-World Challenge as hosted by Paper Tigers – simply because we love Corinne, Marjorie, Sally and Aline and the other lovely ladies that make up their fabulous site. Goal is to read seven books across the different parts of the globe. I don’t think their announcement post is up yet, but we’re definitely in.

We are also joining the Persons-of-Color (POC) Reading Challenge once again – the announcement post has not been set up yet, but I am assuming that this would still be hosted this year. Again, this should be easy-peasy since it can overlap with all our other reading challenges. 🙂 We are aiming for 25 books again.

And finally we are adding one new reading challenge for the year: Immigrant Stories Challenge 2012 hosted by Books in the City. We are aiming for Fully Assimilated where we hope to read more than six books in all. Again, this could overlap with PoC and our other reading challenges which is great.

In summary, here goes:

1. Nonfiction Picture Book Challenge, Target: 12 books
2. Picture Book Reading Challenge, Target: 120 books
3. Caldecott Challenge, Target: 24 books
4. Newbery Medal Challenge, Target: 12 books
5. Reading the World Challenge, Target: 7 books
6. Persons of Color (POC) Reading Challenge, Target: 25 books
7. Immigrant Stories Challenge 2012, Target: 6+ books
8. Award-Winning-Books (AWB) Reading Challenge, Target: Over 35 books. We aim for Platinum, baby! Oooh yeah!

A total of eight reading challenges in all for 2012, ladies and gentlemen. Lezzgetiton! We do it for lovelovelove.