Cynics have foretold the doomsday of reading for decades now. From the days when television dawned to the years that the Internet took over, there’s little that hasn’t been blamed for drawing us away from the book. But it’s precisely the Internet that I point naysayers to these days. There’s a small revolution of reading afoot, and its record-keepers are online. From Facebook-ers and Tweeters, and most predominantly, bloggers, everyone seems to be participating in the numerous year-long ‘Reading Challenges’ that the Internet has birthed. They range from umbrella promises, such as finishing a book a week, to vowing to read only horror writing or chick-lit or dystopian fiction for a year, to even just skimming a short-story a day.
The most widespread of these has been the ‘Year of Reading Women’ challenge. In 2013, an American organisation of women writers, Vida, statistically proved how partial the publishing industry at large, and reviewers in particular, are toward male authors. In response, writer Joanna Walsh floated her personal #readwomen2014 project on Twitter. Publishers, reviewers and readers rallied to her cause worldwide and thousands have spent almost a half-year now, solely reading women. The movement has of course spawned subsects. For instance, to counterweight the world’s proclivity toward reading mostly white women writers, there’s the read ‘Global Women of Colour’ challenge; more specifically, a ‘Year of Reading Arab Women’, and closer home, a ‘South-Asian Women Writers Challenge’.
And that’s the classic characteristic of most reading challenges: to right a common wrong. It’s readers’ way of telling mainstream publishing that they won’t bend to its biases. Just as race and gender burden us toward particular reading preferences, British blogger Ann Morgan, who finished her ‘A Year of Reading the World’ challenge, found geography spoke as loud. In her journey through a book each from 196 UN-officiated nations, she found entire countries from where an English translation just wasn’t commercially available. For instance, the book she read from the African nation Sao Tome and Principe, Olinda Beja’s A Cada do Pastor , was translated specifically for her project. Today, there’s an ‘Africa Reading Challenge’ precisely to unearth such gems. The most contrarian of these challenges is probably the ‘Banned Books Challenge’ that fronts before censorship, the human right to freedom of expression.
Utmost, what such challenges give takers is a global community of like-minded readers. Book blogs and online forums are awash with reviews, discussions and everyone’s progress reports. It’s also an exercise in sheer discipline. The ‘100 Books a Year’ challenge gives you barely four days per book, while the ‘Chunkster Challenge’ dares you to sit through 500-page tomes, and the hugely popular ‘To Be Read Pile’ challenge insists book-buying addicts finish their purchased collections before shopping again. The Big Daddy of these challenges is perhaps, a book itself - The Novel Cure , by authors Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin, lists books that cure everything from adoption blues (Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book ) to heartbreak (Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre ) - a challenge blogger Vivek Tejuja is currently on. Groucho Marx was right when he said, “Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend.”
