Taking on a Challenge: Year of Asian Reading Challenge 2019

Hello, friends! And welcome to another video post!

I’m not Safiya Nygaard, but I’ve always wanted to say that. Okay, moving on.

Last year, in my list of Things I Want to Ditch in 2018, the first thing I added was to stop participating in reading challenges, specifically the Goodreads reading challenge. With work and other responsibilities I had (still have) on hand, I didn’t like the added pressure of having to read a certain number of books by the year’s end, and ending up disappointed in myself when I couldn’t reach that target.

I still stand by that, but this challenge is too good to pass up. I love the idea of exploring and promoting more books by Asian authors, and this is already part of my goals for the year, so yay! The best part is that I don’t think this challenge would give me any added pressure because I’ll still be reading books as usual, it’s just that I will be more conscious and be more selective of the books I choose to read 🙂

Okay, enough from me. Let’s move on to the challenge!

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If you don’t already know, the goal of the Year of Asian Reading Challenge 2019 is to read as many books by Asian authors as possible. It can be in any genre, any format and length, both old and new, even ARCs, as long as you start and finish reading in 2019.

This amazing challenge is hosted by four amazing bloggers: Shealea @ Shut Up, Shealea, CW @ The Quiet Pond, Lily @ Sprinkles of Dreams, and Vicky @ Vicky Who Reads. Thank you so much for hosting this challenge!

You can choose your target level for this challenge and display the badge (which are adorable!). I’m choosing the Indian Cobra, which represents 11-20 books. I think it’s a good number, I can read roughly one book per month so I won’t be overwhelmed.

I don’t even like snakes, but I’m making an exception for this one because look how cute!

I’ll be updating this post to keep track of my progress and I’ll probably be sharing on Twitter as well (I’m hoping to be more active on Twitter this year. Keyword: hoping). I guess I’m a little late posting my participation announcement, but better late than never, right? If you want to see my updates, I’ll be adding this post under the ‘The Random Things’ tab on the menu at the top of the page.

I think that’s about it for this challenge! Let me know if you guys are also taking on this challenge. If you haven’t but want to, don’t worry, you can sign up any time in the year! And don’t forget to visit the lovely bloggers hosting this challenge and give them a follow if you haven’t already 😀

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The Updates

You can click on the book covers to be redirected to my reviews 🙂

Tahereh Mafi is Persian, and Persia/Iran is in Western Asia (I triple checked) so I’m going to consider this my first YARC read of 2019 🙂