Starts: Wednesday, 01 January 2020
Ends: Thursday, 31 December 2020
It’s time for the 2020 Reading Women Challenge! Reading challenges are a great way to read outside your comfort zone—and you get to do it with other bookish friends! The 2020 challenge officially begins January 1st, 2020 and ends December 31st, 2020.
Here’s the rundown: complete as many challenges as you can from the list below. If you have one book that covers two categories (or more!), feel free to count it for both. It's not a contest. Our goal is to encourage you to read widely (and fight the patriarchy, but that was probably a given), so just have fun with it!
Need some recommendations?
- Search the Reading Women Podcast Episode Show Notes of our past episodes (here's a secret, most of the categories are a variation on last year's episodes). They're organized by theme, so it should be pretty easy to zero in on the category you're looking to fill.
- Our Guest Blog Posts are a great resource for international fiction.
- Join the Reading Women Goodreads group for a wealth of recommendations and to chat with others about what you're reading.
- Search the Reading Women Podcast Episode Show Notes of our past episodes (here's a secret, most of the categories are a variation on last year's episodes). They're organized by theme, so it should be pretty easy to zero in on the category you're looking to fill.
- Our Guest Blog Posts are a great resource for international fiction.
- Join the Reading Women Goodreads group for a wealth of recommendations and to chat with others about what you're reading.
Challenge prompts
1. A Book by an Author from the Caribbean or India (235 books added)
Authors from these countries’ diaspora are included in this prompt.
3. A Book about the Environment (217 books added)
4. A Picture Book Written/Illustrated by a BIPOC Author (217 books added)
BIPOC stands for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. For more information on the acronym, visit thebipocproject.org.
6. A Nonfiction Title by a Woman Historian (300 books added)
7. A Book Featuring Afrofuturism or Africanfuturism (81 books added)
Afrofuturism is often defined as “a way of imagining possible futures through a black cultural lens” (Ingrid LaFleur).
You can find out more about Afrofuturism in Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-fi and Fantasy Culture by Ytasha L. Womack.
Examples include N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy, Escaping Exodus by Nicky Drayden, Dread Nation by Justina Ireland, Mind of My Mind by Octavia Butler, Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora edited by Sheree Thomas, My Soul to Keep by Tananarive Due, Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord, and Black from the Future edited by Stephanie Andrea Allen and Lauren Cherelle.
We’ll be discussing Afrofuturism in as our theme for February (2020), so stay tuned!
8. An Anthology by Multiple Authors (245 books added)
Your choice for this prompt can be any type of literature—short stories, essays, poetry, plays, etc.— as long as it’s written by a group of different authors.
All of the authors do not have to be women.
Bonus points if the editor is a woman.
10. A Book about a Woman Artist (280 books added)
For this prompt, we are focusing on women visual artists, like sculptors, painters, potters, etc.