Five years. Fifty classics. I’ve-lost-count-of-how-many pages.

I can’t resist a reading project; I know this. Give me a challenge to attack or boxes to check and I am all over it. (My kids, by contrast, aren’t even interested in the library’s summer reading program – which comes with prizes. Prizes. Who are these children?) This was my second – or maybe third – round of the Classics Club Challenge, which sets the audacious goal of reading and reviewing fifty classic books in five years. In a previous round, I set the even more audacious goal of reading 100. I figured, I read over 100 books in a year; 100 classics over five years – less than 20% of my reading – should be no sweat. Joke’s on me; I discovered that while far more than 20% of my reading is devoted to classics, I tend to read classics other than what is on my challenge list. Apparently the quickest way to guarantee that I won’t read a book: put it on a list. Who knew.

I’m going to try to remember that. Because I did read some really wonderful books over this round of challenge reading, and it would have been a shame to miss out. There were re-reads, like The Tenant of Wildfell Hall… new favorite series, like the Chronicles of Barsetshire or the Mapp & Lucia novels… hilarious books like Three Men on the Bummel… lesser-known treasures like The Priory…

Still, I did note that especially once I got to the end, I was getting weary of the project and weary of the books I’d gleefully listed out five years before. I didn’t want to read these; I still wanted to read classics, but different classics. I’d made the cardinal error of making reading feel like school. (And I liked school.) It was almost reading slump territory.

I am glad I did this project. I read some really spectacular books, and the review requirement forced me to think about them critically and carefully. I discovered some new-to-me favorites, and I’ll certainly be going back and re-reading many of the books on my Classics Club list. But I think I need a good long break before I do this particular challenge again – if at all. I’d rather just read what I feel like reading, without the pressure of checking something off a list. And the funny thing about that is: what I feel like reading is generally classics, so I’ll still be working my way through plenty of those.

Still, I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t have some goal or project or another in mind. And I do, rather.

A few years ago, I was heavily addicted to library books. I was walking to the Barrett Branch library in Old Town Alexandria at least twice a week, and maybe more, and bringing home stacks. And as I read my way through library book after library book, I sometimes glanced at my own shelves and sighed; I never seemed to have time to read the books that I’d deemed worthy of a permanent space on my shelves. How could this be? Then the pandemic hit, and my library visits screeched to a halt – and I was forced to read from my own shelves. This was just the spark I needed. Even after the library cautiously reopened for curbside pickup, I only returned sporadically; it was too much fun to read my own books, like I’d been wanting to do for years.

Of course, over the three years since my enforced return to my own bookshelves, I’ve added more books (and another shelf). Because of course I have. So I am not sure I’ve actually made much progress towards reading everything I actually own – classic.

So that’s my new goal, or really, my ongoing goal: to read my own books. It’s a loose goal, or a non-goal. There’s no timeframe and no rules: I just want to keep reading my own books and maybe someday get down to Inbox Zero on the bookshelf situation. Maybe I’ll do this methodically or maybe I won’t – I haven’t decided how I’ll keep track, if at all, and I know I won’t read according to any order or system. I’m just going to pick up books from my shelves that look good in the moment and try not to buy too many more for awhile. We’ll see how that goes.

Have you ever done a reading challenge? Did you find it valuable or did it kind of ruin the books for you?