I spent way too many hours making a reading challenge spreadsheet for myself, so I figured I'd share it in case anyone else thinks it sounds fun.

I wanted a reading challenge that would take me a really long time to finish. Like, realistically, probably years if I ever decide to go for full completion.

The idea started with a simple question:

What if an alphabet challenge wasn't just one book per letter?

Instead of reading one book for A and moving on, you can keep working on A by finding books with different cover colours.

Maybe your first A book has a red cover. Then later you find a blue one. Then a green one.

The challenge combines an alphabet challenge with a cover colour challenge. Every letter has 12 colour prompts, so you can keep working on a letter instead of immediately moving on to the next one. Or you can jump all around. Whatever you want! There are different achievements and 'tiers' so you can still get them even if you don't complete letters! I did make the rules a bit lax for the letter part to make it more reader friendly. It can come from the title or the author name.

You can play casually and just fill in a few colours here and there, or go completely overboard and try to complete every colour for every letter.

Naturally, I went completely overboard and built a spreadsheet for it.

The spreadsheet includes:

-Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum tiers for every letter -28 achievements (these will fill in automatically if you tick in the tracker) -Automatic progress tracking -Reading statistics -A book log -Achievement tracking

My favourite part is probably the achievement system. It gives the challenge a bit of a game-like feel and breaks things up with goals beyond simply filling in boxes.

I had a lot of fun putting this together, and I'm excited to start using it myself. If it sounds like your kind of thing, feel free to check it out!

Rainbow ABC's Challenge Spreadsheet

I'll include a couple sheet screenshots in the comments!

Edit: Feel free to come back to this post and share when you get achievements or tiers! I’d so love to cheer you on!

Also don’t hesitate to let me know if something doesn’t work! I did my best to test every formula but I could have missed something.

I just had the insanely jarring realization that honeymoons are a thing and I completely forgot about them when I set my username. I’ve always used “ golden moon” something as gaming usernames and just thought honey moon was a cute variation 🫠

This made me start wondering if I was similarly misreading anyone else’s usernames and what some of them meant. So while I think of a new username, I wanted to ask everyone what’s the story behind your username? 👀

Edit: The rebrand has been done 😌

JD Vance is publishing a book called Communion on June 16. bell hooks already published a book entitled Communion: the Female Search for Love.

This is the second title he has stolen from bell hooks. His previous book was entitled Hillbilly Elegy, and hooks’ book, published 4 years prior, was Appalachian Elegy. In addition to downright plagiarism, people have pointed out that this is search engine manipulation and keyword appropriation (they love to do that - did you know that anti-choice people are now calling themselves abortion abolitionists??? 🤮) - which ends up censoring Black feminist thought.

There is an effort to put hooks’ Communion on the best seller list on June 16. Yes I will buy the audiobook from Black Walnut Books on libro.fm on June 16 just to spite him.

**I must admit I don’t fully know how best seller lists work and I’ve seen others just calling for people to buy the book in general and request it from the library, not specifically on June 16. Curious if anyone who knows how those lists work can explain why to buy specifically on that day?

***Community-wide read along of hooks’ Communion?