The Personal Challenge

I found the most interesting part of A Walk in the Woods to be how inspiring it is. I don't know what makes the book make me so interested in completing a big grand gesture, especially since he himself does not and is none to favorable in his account of the experience. Maybe part of the draw is being able to humbly brag about your accomplishment at dinner parties and on first dates, so the others around you know that you are someone Who Has Done Something. But, nonetheless, a third of the way through the book, there I was with an urge to just take the time to complete some personal challenge. My personal challenge would not be to walk that far, or even a third of that distance, but to complete a long reading challenge.

There are a few I could choose from. The Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge, which consists of reading the more than 300 novels that appear in Gilmore Girls, or a Goodreads challenge length of my own choosing (probably around 200 books for the year), or I could do Bustle's year of reading only women, or read Penguin Random House's 80 Little Black Classics. There are quite a few challenges to choose from and each introduces you to many novels you might not otherwise prioritize. And I think that being able to say that I had accomplished something like this, like reading that whole Rory Gilmore list, would be an interesting experiment and would force me to read some of those influential classics I could otherwise continue to ignore in my pursuit of other, usually newer, reads.

Additionally, there are reading marathons, held in different cities around the world, reading different books at different times, that would be another challenge. New York City holds a marathon read of Steins' Making of America, Dublin hosts Bloomsday, at which Ulysses is marathon read. These never ending readathons would be another interesting challenge - say attending 4 in a year. Or another challenge could be to visit the real life places in or that inspired the settings and events of something like you 50 favorite novels. One could read all the books long-listed for a certain award. There are a lot of options.