let’s talk bookish | woes of an adhd reader (or, why reading challenges aren’t for me)
Hello again, dear friends! I hope all is well for you, and if not then I hope brighter days head your way soon! Today I’m so excited to be participating in Let’s Talk Bookish yet again! This week we’re discussing reading challenges and, as a reader with ADHD, I think I might have a relatively unique perspective.
Let’s Talk Bookish is a weekly bookish discussion meme created by Rukky at Eternity Books and now hosted by Aria at Book Nook Bits and Dini at dinipandareads. This week’s prompt is…
Reading Challenges: Do we love them or hate them?
What do you think of reading challenges—do they motivate you or do they feel restrictive and end up making reading feel like a chore? Are there any challenges you participate in yearly? What reading challenges are you joining in 2025?
Despite falling into the trap of attempting them year after year, I’ve generally found that reading challenges are not for me. I could put it down to me being a Sagittarius and not liking requirements because they make me feel cagey, but the truth is I think it more comes down to me having severe ADHD. I love the idea of setting goals or having reading prompts, but I struggle to organize myself enough to complete them, plus I often get distracted by other books and forget about the challenge until it’s too late. By the time I remember the challenge, it’s usually later in the year and as I see everyone else celebrating their progress, it kinda triggers my RSD (rejection sensitive dysphoria, which is a common symptom of ADHD) and I feel bad about not having made progress on the reading challenges I’m a part of. This leads to me feeling anxious and trying to scramble to complete reading challenges with books I’m not even interested in reading at that moment.
This is all compounded by the fact that I’m a disabled undergraduate student who already has lots of coursework to complete, and thus has less time to read than I’d like. In recent years I’ve only managed to complete about ten books per year, due to my hectic schedule and restricted energy. Instead of allowing myself to be okay with that because I’m doing the best I can with what life has handed me at the moment, I long for the years where I was reading upwards of seventy books per year. So I always think reading challenges will help me increase the number of books I read, but instead they leave me feeling overwhelmed and feeling bad about not being able to read that much, which doesn’t exactly motivate me to read at all.
So why do I keep joining reading challenges, then? I guess it comes down to FOMO and also to wanting to be included in what others appear to be having fun with. Which is kinda silly, cause just because something is fun for someone else, doesn’t mean it’s fun for me. Alas, I struggle to remember that when there are so many shiny reading challenges with creative and seemingly fun systems and prompts!
So, to help take the pressure off, in recent years I’ve decided that I’ll “loosely” participate in reading challenges. That is, if I join a reading challenge I’ll only read the books I’m genuinely interested in at the moment and if that happens to complete a prompt, cool, but if it doesn’t, then I’m not going to stress about it. This means that I often don’t fully complete the challenge in full, but at least I get to participate and not feel left out. So far, this has been working in ensuring I don’t end up feeling overwhelmed and anxious.
As for the reading challenges I’ve loosely joined this year, I’m doing Austine Decker’s year-long Beat The Backlist challenge, as I want to get more books off of my heaping backlist TBR of books I actually own, and I’m considering taking part in G’s Choose Your Own Adventure: Year in Aeldia year-long readathon that, as it looks fun and creative. But other than that and maybe the occasional month-long readathon, I’m not committing to anything else, for the sake of my mental health.
spill the beans, friends!
Do you enjoy reading challenges? Or do they stress you out? Are you participating in any reading challenges this year?
I really appreciate your honesty here. And I resonate wth many of the things you said like feeling FOMO and wanting to feel the same joy people do when participating in reading challenges and having to conciously take a step back and think, hey this might not work for me and that’s okay!
Great post I loved your take on it
Thank you so much for your kind word, Leyre! I’m so glad my post resonates with you 💖
I’ve never participated in a reading challenge before but this year I got a reading journal and it has these fun pages with pictures of bookcases where you take part in a challenge and fill in what you read. I’m hoping to try at least one this year. Last year I set myself the challenge of reading 100 books and I achieved it but this year I haven’t set anything and luckily so as I am in a rut now 🤣. Also off topic but I’m planning starting college this year, as a disabled student do you have any tips for someone with chronic pain on how to go about doing it best? Enjoyed reading your post and I hope loads of amazing books come your way in 2025! 😊✨️💗
Congrats on starting college! I’d say my biggest tips are definitely planning ahead so that you can pace yourself (and thus don’t get overwhelmed last minute whilst also having a flare up), make sure to secure your accommodations, ask for permission within your accommodations letter to record lectures, find a buddy to body double with and ask them to record lectures in the case that you need to leave early or miss a class, find out if your school has a tutoring center and/or if different departments have tutors available and utilize weekly tutoring sessions even if you feel you don’t need them (this ensures you fully understand course content and don’t fall behind on coursework), and figure out your learning style (there are more learning styles than visual, verbal, and kinesthetic, so a quick google search for “learning styles” can help if you don’t already know) so you can find teachers and classmates who mesh with your style and you can leverage it to tailor content to meet your needs.
Idk your major or what classes you’re planning on taking, but I have a Tumblr post I made full of spoonie-friendly and neurodivergent-friendly tips for STEM classes: https://anthroamazed.tumblr.com/post/724741473605746688/tips-for-stem-majors-in-math-and-science-courses
I hope this helps and good luck!
Thank you and thanks so much for the tips!! 🙌 You’ve given me a lot to think about and to involve. I will definitely be taking a look at your tumblr post. Very helpful and I appreciate it! 😊💗
Weirdly enough, I also start feeling caged in when I HAVE TO read something and am immediately a lot less interested… Sagittarii unite, I guess! 🤣
Loosly participating in challenges, with no strings attached, has given me a fun push to read when things get more stressful or try books I otherwise might never have picked up, though. So I definitely appreciate them on the whole!
Yessss us Sagitarii must stick together (with a few feet between us, of course, so we don’t feel cagey 🤣🤣🤣)!