2016 has been a page-turner of a year – literally. 

This year I have turned the pages of more than 80 books from cover to cover. Many of them books I never would’ve read had it not been for Book Riot’s 2016 Read Harder Challenge. (Click here for Book Riot’s 2017 challenge.) As I’ve shared before, the Read Harder Challenge consists of 24 reading prompts designed to help readers explore books, authors and genres outside the reader’s usual go-to comfort zone. 

This year, thanks to the challenge, I explored new places, read my first horror novel (The Reapers Are the Angels), found humor in getting older (I Feel Bad About My Neck), cheered for the underdog (The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind), checked one more to-read classic off my list (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), and survived in a post-apocalyptic world (Station Eleven). 

And while every page I turned was an unforgettable adventure, more often than not, the real adventure was researching and finding the books that would qualify for these reading prompts. Take for example, the prompt to read a book by a Southeast Asian author: First you have to know what countries exactly make up Southeast Asia. I ended up reading a beauty of a book – The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng. For the prompt to read a book published in the decade you were born, I don’t exactly have a list of those in my head. However, I was delighted to see All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot was published in the 70s since that has been on my to-read list for quite some time.

I enjoyed this reading challenge so much I decided to partake in creating a new reading challenge for our Anythink readers. Here at Anythink Wright Farms, we've put together a reading challenge for 2017 that includes 12 different reading prompts. Each month there will be books on display to fit one of the reading prompt categories – doing the research work for you and making it easier for you to try something new!

I am so excited to start this list and I hope you will join me on this new reading adventure in 2017.

2017 Anythink Wright Farms Reading Challenge 

• January: A book on a political view different from your own
• February: A novel with an unreliable narrator 
• March: A translated work
• April: A book that is out of this world, with a setting in space or on another planet
• May: A book with a narrator that is something other than human (Click here for our list of books with suprising perspectives if you want to get a head-start on this one.) 
• June: A self-help book for personal growth
• July: A Newberry Medal Winner published prior to 2000
• August: A non-fiction book that reads like fiction 
• September: A book by an African author 
• October: An audiobook with multiple readers
• November: A true-crime book
• December: The first book in a teen series