Reading Challenges, 2021 Reading Plans, An Updated CAWPILE Sheet

 As I've shared before, I have never completed a Goodreads reading challenge. Granted, this is only my 3rd year participating, but after the summer I spent as a teen reading 50 books every two weeks... I kept thinking I could do better. I forgot about adulting.

In 2018, I read 57 of the 100 I wanted to, and the only reason I got to 47 of the 50 I pledged in 2019 was because of audiobooks and LeVar Burton reading me short stories on his podcast... I made a pledge in 2020 using logic. I determined that I could probably read about 5 books a month, totaling 60 for the year. That was more than last year, but breaking it down by the month, like a monthly goal, it didn't seem so daunting.

Like Sands in an Hourglass...

There's a mere 8-ish weeks left in the year and I haven't completed my challenge yet, but I just finished book 59 of 60, and for the record, there were only 4 short stories from LeVar's podcast and one novella from a series. So if someone from the book social media community doesn't count that as a book read, number 1, piss on ya and number 2, that would take me down to 55 books read, still beating last year's challenge. Besides, the last book to complete my challenge will either be Judi McCoy's Making Over Mr. Right, Lilian Jackson Braun's The Cat Who Saw Red, or another such book I've been meaning to read or get to finish, like Sarah J. Maas' Heir of Fire, whenever I get the ebook back on loan. All three are left over from my October TBR.

All in all, with 8 weeks to go in the year and a plethora of TBR books at my disposal, I'll complete the year's challenge easily. But it brings me to my plans for next year. I've never really thought that far ahead when it comes to my hobbies. I've been a mood hobbyist for most of my life. Whatever I feel like doing in the moment I do. It has caused me to fail to finish many a project or goal.

Planning a Reading Journey?

In my planning journey this year, I found that others were making their to do lists far more meaningful. They had a plan of attack so to speak. I even found out there were reading planners that people were making and selling! I found out about reading journals, well, more about reading journals, and how to make them impactful. Then I heard about reading challenges that didn't have anything to do with just the number of books read at all!

So what kind of plan do I want to have? Do I want to continue to churn through books as the mood strikes me? Do I want to go outside my comfort zone and read books that aren't really what I gravitate towards and see if there's some other hidden gem like Me: Elton John?

A Better Rating System Leads to Some Realizations

The idea of using a gut-feeling, 5-Star rating system has always bugged me and I also recently wrote about how I've started to use the CAWPILE rating system shared by Book Roast over on BookTube. I've started to use it on all the books and stories I've read or listened to this year. I rate my reads with a bit more confidence, knowing that I am being a little more critical and intentional and most importantly consistent.

At the same time, I flew through a large portion of my fantasy Goodreads TBR, finally finished a series, went back to old series and got through more of the stories' installments, and felt extremely accomplished. But as I look over the 60-ish books I've read/am reading, I realize that there is a slightly, to me, disturbing trend there. I don't read a good variety of genres or authors.

Modification Is Key

I heavily modified G's spreadsheet to suit my needs better. I'm not sure if the version I downloaded was broken or not, but the STATS tab she had wasn't populating with data like other bloggers shared that it did for them. I also didn't jive with the genres it included, so I added columns, took some out, and modified the genre column into 3 different columns: Type, Main Genre, and Subgenre.

I had found an article breaking down the approximately 144 subgenres of fiction. Oh My Goodness! It has been such a huge help in deciding what I actually like and what a book more likely is. When I was needing something to write to test out my grandmother's old dip pen nibs and all my new inks, I took the information from this extensive article and filled 3 pocket sized BuJo inserts with the basic bones of each subgenre. Two birds with one stone: tested my nibs and inks, gave me a handy reference.

The Columns

I researched how to make dependent lists in Excel by adding another tab to the document, naming ranges, and updated the stats page to accommodate all aspects of my increased data sets. When I add in a book I have completed, it looks a little something like this:

• Column A: Month This is the month I completed the book.
• Column B: Title 
• Column C: Author 
• Column D: Format Drop down menu denoting Book, Audiobook, or E-Book. I'm thinking about editing it to add in Podcast because I do listen to LeVar Burton Reads a lot, but I currently have that in the Owned/Borrowed column for some inexplicable reason. 
• Column E: Material This is a bit of a confusing category just by its title. This is where I break down if it is a Novel, Novella, Short Story, Graphic Novel, Comic, Manga, Poetry, Play, or Screenplay. I felt that Manga, Graphic Novel and Comic shouldn't be in the Genre column. Also Plays and Screenplays are different in a tangible way to me. All of these materials can have different genres and shouldn't be listed as genres themselves. For example, Manga can be fantasy or science fiction or Western and can be further broken down into subgenre. To me, Manga is not a genre at all, but a medium of story telling. 
• Column F: Pages Because I usually read ebooks and mostly listen to audiobooks, I have not bothered to fill this out. I contemplated removing it, but what if I do a challenge that pledges pages? I might look up page counts for my books in 2021 from publishers or something. I have to figure out how to write the formula for the stats pages where it will add up all the page counts from column F if and only if Column A is a specific month. But I have plenty of time to rework those cells. 
• Column G: Book Type Literally just Fiction or Nonfiction. I needed a way to help break down the next column with all those wonderful dependent dropdown lists.
• Column H: Main Genre If Col G is Nonfiction, this column lists a drop down of History, Biography, Travelogues, Academic, Philosophy, Journalism, Selfhelp, Guides, and Humor. If the column is Fiction it switches to a drop down list of Fantasy, Mystery, Thriller, ScienceFiction, Romance, Western, Horror, and Literary. These are taken from Thompson's 144 Genres and Subgenre's article with my addition of the Literary category. I had 3 short stories and a book this year that just didn't fit into the original fiction genre list. For the record, there will be a significant lack of Horror in my reading lists. Sorry, Not Sorry.
• Column I: Subgenre Each of the Genres in Column H changes the drop down in this column. I wanted to see specifically the types of books I was reading, what is my go to, how I felt about books outside my normal comfort zone. I figured this could help me find out if I should branch out into other subgenres.
• Column J: Age Category This dropdown allows me to separate the books I read into Children's, Middle Grade, Young Adult, New Adult, and Adult. 
• After watching Elliot Brooks and Merphy Napier a TON this year, I learned about this newly named age category called New Adult that G's dropdown includes. These books seem to be books that are marketed to Young Adults, but they deal with more adult themes, like an introduction to the sordid side of life type stories. In addition, I feel like "YA" should be kept to teen protagonists up to about age 20. There are other adults still legally and/or financially responsible for them. New Adults are slightly older, dealing with stories about starting career, first apartment, and their relationships with their parents or grandparents has started to shift slightly into contemporaries or complete role reversal where we see the younger person becoming the caregivers.
• Column K: Owned/Borrowed This is an original G file column. I don't buy a lot of books. It is rare that I will reread a book and I don't really have IRL friends that like the same books I do consistently enough to pass them off to. If I read a book from the library (in any format) and love it enough, I will go and buy the physical book. I have the entire book sets for Percy Jackson as well as the Heroes of Olympus and intend to buy the ENTIRETY of Tamora Pierce's catalogue. I have read these multiple times and will again. I also have the first two in Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series given to me by a sister with the intent to have the entire series. But as a general rule, my shelf space is for crafting, not books.
• Columns L-R: CAWPILE Categories Didn't change a thing here. Read more about the categories in my original post, search Google for other bloggers reviews of the system, or go watch G's video already!
• Column S: Aggregate Rating The average of the CAWPILE Categories.
• Columns T-W: G's hidden spreadsheet workings Don't touch these!!! They're squish-hidden for a reason and editing them will break everything.
• Column Y: Star Rating Don't edit this column either. You'll break it unless you are super skilled in Excel. I also like how she has the field turn different colors based on the numbers 0-5. 
• Columns Z, AA, & AB: Date Started, Finished, Days Read Pretty self explanatory.
• Column AC & AD: POC, Gender These are interesting columns that I wouldn't have thought to include. But in this past year, it's definitely become something we should think about. Is the author a person of color? What is the author's gender? It currently lists Female, Male, and Non-binary. I'm contemplating the pros and cons of adding Trans in there as well. I feel like I should broaden my horizons and be more purposeful in the books I read. Not just for the book's content, but who the author is. If I'm not reading books by people who are considered other, how can I say I support them if I'm not actually freaking supporting their work? Actions, not words.
• Column AF: Publication Year I really think I need to move this column. If I do it will change all my columns and possibly break my pretty stat page... But putting this way at the end rather than up with the Author and Title... Doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

Breaking down the Stats

So with all that windiness out of the way, I must confess that I have only gone through Columns A - H for this year's books. I'm still determining the subgenre for a few, which is what prompted the addition of Fiction: Literary in the first place. I am also only through rating my January books in the CAWPILE system. It's taking me a lot longer than I had planned because I am going back and critically thinking about them, refreshing my memory on events in the stories, and then ultimately sharing my thoughts via a Goodreads review. My series tend to blend into one long story in my head, so breaking them down by individual book is essential to the rating process.

In Main Genre, here's the current break down:

See the pattern? The left hand column is all the Fiction books while the right shares the Nonfiction. Literally 2. And I'm not quite sure the History book really counts as Nonfiction because it was Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman. I listed its subgenre as 'Mythology' because I do like myths and legends and can see myself in the future reading more non fiction books that relate to this or talk about the myths and legends. This one just happened to be Neil Himself reading to us the myths in his own retelling.

Additionally, 26 Fantasy?!?! 43% if my reading this year was in one genre. And here I thought I was a bit more rounded than that! The next closest is Thriller at 16%. And that is because I went back to Brad Thor's Scot Harvath this year and found two series that he has written crossovers with, James Rollins' Sigma Force and Steve Berry's Cotton Malone. Which incidentally are 3 middle-aged or older white dudes. Sigh.

Intentional Reading and Reading Challenges

To help me broaden my reading selection for next year I went in search of reading challenges that were less about the number of books read and more about picking up books you normally wouldn't snag. I decided to join one of Girlxoxo.com's 2021 reading challenges next year, specifically the Monthly Motif Challenge and The Uncorked Librarian's Uncorked Reading Challenge. I think the hardest part is going to be the checking in, remembering to do it. GXO has social media check ins and posts and Uncorked Librarian has a cute little bookmark and a printable you can put in your planner. What's even better for me is that each month the social media groups they offer will share options and suggestions for books that satisfy the monthly challenges. This will really help me expand my reading horizons.

GXO.com also has a routinely updated page where they gather links to other reading challenges for next year. I actually found some really good ones that I might consider from the list so far. Go check it out! The page says they will update it every Sunday through January 2021 as they find more challenges.

Off to Compile Stats

So with all that, I'm off. I need to at least finish filling out the rest of the sheet for all my books in the various columns other than rating. Then I can feel better about making progress. The ratings and reviews will be slow going.

Until Next Time...
Keep Reading!!