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 finally had time to watch the whole announcement video with the prompts ( here if you're interested ) and to say I'm excited would be an understatment. I missed version 1 and 2 (youtube hid it from me!) so I'm so ready for 3

I don't like "strict" challenges because reading is my hobby and I don't want to feel like I'm back in school, but because it's prompts and not specific genres or books, this one feels very accessible and like it won't spoile the fun of reading but add some spice to it.

And there's a KIDS/ TEENS version this year which I think is amazing. And an "easy" version. And a gamified version. 🤯

I'll do the normal one. And by that I mean, I'll see how far I can go without making it a chore and keep it amusing for myself. Because that's a lot of books. 150 if I counted right? But since you can use 1 book for 2 prompts, I guess you could do 75. There's no way I'll finish but bloody hell I'm excited!! If it turns out I'm not having fun I'll switch to the easy version and do 25 books. Or I'll just give up, who knows. But for right now, I just want to start planning and reading and did I tell you I'm excited? Because I'm excited.

And since I'm that excited, I'm starting now and giving myself 13 months, until july 6 2027. Because Stephanie said I could and because I'm a grown up and I can do what I want ;)

So anyway, will anyone be participating? If you do, would you like a weekly/biweekly/monthly accountability/motivation post? I don't want to spam the forums if there's no interest... Will you plan your books or just try to fit in whatever you read into the prompts later on? Selfishly, I want to know if I'm alone and if I'm not I wanna follow you to spy on what you read and try and guess the prompt you're reading for.

I just want to share the excitement. I'm so happy there's an easy and a kids version because it opens the fun to so many more people! And I love how customizable it all is. There's the fun of looking for something to fit the prompt without the not-fun part of having to read a specific book or genre.

i'm curious to know if there are titles you have that you constantly recommend to your friends, especially to new readers who are still exploring their preferred genres.

my personal favorites include:

1. andy weir - project hail mary
2. rachel gillig - one dark window
3. ali hazelwood books (i recommend whatever title based on what trope they're likely to prefer)
4. suzanne collins - the hunger games trilogy

these are the titles that i know are beginner friendly. very interested to see what's yours, since i'm also planning to dabble in other genres other than my usual.

I'm sure there's a way to do this, and I'm sure I knew the way at some point, but I can't for the life of me find it anymore!

I just read an ARC that is only 20 pages. While usually I would count it in my reading challenge, I don't want to count this one for several reasons. But I want to mark it as finished, just not for it to count toward my 60 read goals.

Help? I know the option is there somewhere but I can't see it 👀👓