For the past two years my aim had been to read 24 books in a year. Now 24 is a great number but the important thing for me was to read a variety of books from different authors. 

While looking for recommendations for this year on what to read, I stumbled upon a video by benreadsgood. He gives 12 different reading prompts for each month. They were fun yet not too specific and some books from my TBR just fit right in. So I decided to join his Read Good Challenge 2024 in StoryGraph.

Gentle Reminder – reading challenges and reading prompts are there just to help you get started. Read whatever you like and don’t stress about the numbers. Enjoying it is the goal 🙂.

Ben gives a full overview on his reading prompts in his youtube channel – link here and the link to join the challenge.

These are what I picked for each month for his prompts…

January – Ann-uary: Read a book by any Author with the name Ann in it. My pick was Tom Lake by Ann Patchett. I honestly wanted to read this since I saw the cover and it was in many of the top books of 2023 lists. This first prompt itself made me think I could do it.

February – Fever-uary: Read a post-apocalyptic book. I picked How High we Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu. Now this book has been in my TBR for quite some time and I had no idea it fit here. I still don’t know much about the plot but added it based on other readers’ suggestions.

March – Book adapted into an Oscar nominated movie: The Color Purple by Alice Walker. There are definitely a lot more out there but I wanted to read this one. 

April – Read a Book that has won the women’s prize: Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingslover. Great selections in this category, there were quite a few I already had on my TBR but decided to read something more recent. If I am able to I will also try and read All the Lives We Never Lived by Anuradha Roy. This book won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2022 for English. (Sahitya Akademi Award is an Indian literary honor conferred annually to works in 24 language categories)

May – May-gical realism: A book with magical realism. My favorite category of all ♥️. For now I have added a Murakami book Sputnik Sweetheart but this category is wide open.

June – Reading Shame forgiveness month: This is a very interesting category. There are many many books that I have kept in my TBR for too long. Added The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese because a really nice stranger recommended this to me at the airport and I promised to read it and yet haven’t. 

July – Read a work in Translation: Again lots of options especially since I can only read translated works of many Indian authors.There are so many good novels in many regional languages. Selected Breaking Free by Vasanthi as I already had a physical copy. My other choice was Anxious People by Fredrik Backman.

August – Read a book nominated for booker prize: My choices are Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan and Pyre by Perumal Murugan. The former was so highly recommended I had to read it. And Pyre (Pukkuli) is an International Booker Longlisted book so naturally I was going to add it. I am excited to read the original version in Tamil.

September – Short Story Collection: Again two choices. Ruskin Bond’s A Mussoorie Mystery is a collection of short stories he likes, not only those that he wrote. Things We Lost In The Fire by Mariana Enriquez – Again a book that was neglected in my TBR.

October – Ug-tober: Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh. Got to give a đź‘Ť to Ben on this one. I would never have picked this book if not for this category. I have mixed feelings about that cover.

November – No-paragraph-break-vember: Read books with few or no paragraph breaks. I honestly didn’t have much idea on this one. For Ben, this category pushes him to read something outside his comfort area so I customised it to fit me and changed it to No-comfort-vember. Read books outside my comfort zone and memoirs are definitely high up on that list. Hence I picked Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner. Another one in my periphery is When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi.

December – Read a book published by an Indie press: To be decided. This one category I am going to keep open because this will need me to go book hunting at the local stores. Will fill in when I find a book that fits.  

Looking forward to reading more awesome books…!