{"id":25388,"date":"2022-10-12T03:25:44","date_gmt":"2022-10-12T08:25:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sadieforsythe.com\/wp\/?p=25388"},"modified":"2025-12-26T08:41:17","modified_gmt":"2025-12-26T14:41:17","slug":"2022-winter-reading-challenge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/sadieforsythe.com\/wp\/2022-winter-reading-challenge\/","title":{"rendered":"2022 Winter Reading Challenge"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s that time of year again, time to set out my yearly Winter Reading Challenge<\/em>. OK, it might be a stretch to call it yearly. I did a big one<\/a> last year<\/a> and a small one in 2017<\/a>. But I’m aiming to make it yearly. How about that?<\/p>\n

Here’s a little history\/housekeeping first. In those past posts, I’ve called this my Christmas Reading Challenge<\/em>. Then, at some point last year, I had an ah-ha moment and realized that was problematic. It excludes all the other holidays occurring at around the same time.<\/p>\n

For me, Christmas is Santa, elves, and shiny bows. I simply wasn’t thinking nativity scenes versus yule logs or menorahs. But once I realized that even my secular use of the word Christmas was excluding other people’s celebrations of the season, I switched over to the Holiday Reading<\/em> Challenge (trying to be more inclusive). However, that left me with consistency issues, as I’d said ‘Christmas’ for the first half of the challenge, which annoyed me.<\/p>\n

\"snowflake-Image<\/a>So, this year, I’m avoiding the issue altogether and going with the Winter Reading Challenge<\/em>. This has a second bonus benefit, too. I read a ton<\/em> of holiday books and stories last year (44)! Which is great since the whole point of a holiday challenge is to clear holiday-themed books off my TBR. I tend to pick them up throughout the year, but find that I almost never want to read a holiday book in, say, June. So, it’s read them this time of year or not at all. And I enjoyed the heck out of it overall.<\/p>\n

But, honestly, I also got really<\/em> tired of holiday-themed books toward the end. This is partly just too much of a good thing. But it was also a symptom of the fact that a lot of the holiday-themed books I had on my shelves were\/are contemporary romances, and I simply haven’t been craving contemporary romances lately.<\/p>\n

So, the secondary benefit of making this a Winter Reading Challenge instead of a Holiday Reading Challenge is that I got to pick out books that give me a general sense of Winter Vibes. That gives me a lot more books to choose from, and I hope it will avoid the holiday theme burnout. There are some cons to this, though.<\/p>\n