2026 Reading Challenges for Book Lovers

Reading challenges are great for spicing up your reading life, getting out of book slumps, diversifying your reading and helping you keep track of what you read. Reading challenges come in various shapes and sizes, with some focusing on a certain genre, time period or theme and having different rules, but the ultimate goal is simple: read more books and have a blast doing it!

If you’re looking for some great reading challenges to join, here are some recommendations.

Reading Challenges For Book Lovers

Something Bookish Reading Challenge

Run by the fantastic Amyn of Lipglossmaffia, this challenge comes with 24 prompts to help you “break out of your reading comfort zone and travel the world through books”. So if you want to expand your literary horizons, this is a great challenge for you. You can find the prompts here on the Storygraph page and follow the Something Bookish Instagram page for book recommendations for the prompts and more fun bookish commentary. Amyn also runs a virtual book club called The Indulgent Bibliophile which you can check out.

Read Harder Challenge

You can’t talk about reading challenges without mentioning Book Riot’s Read Harder challenge. Running for almost a decade, this challenge comes with 24 prompts chosen to help you diversify your TBR. It also has a newsletter which you can sign up for to get book recommendations and guidance on each prompt. 

Decolonize Your Bookshelf Reading Journey

Reading books written by and about a diverse range of people is as important as ever, and this challenge is dedicated to helping you with that. Created by Dominique Burleson of Paperbacks & Frybread, this reading journey comes with prompts (on Storygraph), and a book club Facebook group for interacting with other readers.

What’s special about this challenge is that it also has a paid book box subscription, the Decolonize Your Bookshelf Challenge Box, which you can sign up for to receive a book for a specific prompt each month.

📖 Related Post: 9 Diverse Anthologies You Should Add To Your Reading List

Storygraph’s Read the World Challenge

Every year 10 countries are chosen and you’re challenged to read fiction or nonfiction books written by authors from those countries. This challenge helps you broaden your literary horizons by reading books from countries you might not have been exposed to and it’s also a way to appreciate literature from all over the globe. This challenge is run by StoryGraph, a book tracking platform that I recommend you check out.

Uncorked Reading Challenge

This is a pretty elaborate reading challenge that has quarterly bingo cards with prompts themed around travel, diverse authors, history, fantastical beings and places. There’s also a Facebook group where you can interact with other book lovers and a newsletter you can sign up for to get book recommendations for the challenge prompts.

Books in Translation Reading Challenge

This aim of this challenge is to get people to read more translated books, and it’s hosted by Jenifer @ The Introverted Reader. It’s not limited to books translated to English, so you can read any book that’s been translated from another language into a language of your choice. There are no prompts for this challenge, so you can read as little or as many translated books as you want.

Book to Movie (and TV) Reading Challenge

This is a pretty fun one as it’s based around books that are being adapted into movies and/or TV series in the current year. This is a great way to read the books before watching the movies so you can answer the age-long question – is the book better than the movie? 😂 Just kidding. You can go to the challenge page to see a list of book adaptations that’ll be released this year or do a little Google search so you can make your list of books to read for this challenge.

Beat the Backlist

If you have books that have been on your reading list forever and you want to read fewer newly published books, then this is the reading challenge for you. Beat the Backlist is focused on helping you read books published in previous years, which are called backlist books. This means you wouldn’t read a book published in 2026 for this challenge, but books published in earlier years. It does come with some prompts, but this is optional as the main goal is to read any backlist books. It doesn’t matter the genre, format or how old it is, as long as it was published before the current year.

📖 Related Post: 18 Books by Authors of Nigerian Descent That Came Out in 2025

Disability Reading Challenge 2026

Created by Geetanshi @book.noted, this challenge centers intersectionality and diversity within disability representation in literature, from physical & mental disabilities to invisible/undiagnosed, sensory, and psychiatric disabilities. There are 12 prompts to guide you in reading books written by disabled authors or that explore disability in some way.

#ReadMyShelf Challenge

Created by @estherfungreads, the focus of this challenge is to read the books you own. This is great for those who buy books often but haven’t had the chance or been in the right mood to read them. For this challenge, you’d go through the books on your bookshelf that you haven’t read yet and pick which to read throughout the year.

Feminist Reading Challenge

Created by @livs.literary.nook, this reading challenge is great for those who want to read more books by women, non-binary writers and writers of colour. It comes with 24 prompts which you can find here, and you can also get book recommendations for the prompts on Liv’s IG page.

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This is just a short list of reading challenges, and if you want to find more, check out this post by The Candid Cover and this post by Chapter Adventure.

Reading Challenge Tips

You didn’t ask for this but you’re going to get it anyways 😂. Here are some tips for taking part in reading challenges and having a healthy reading life. Some might be pretty obvious, but sometimes you just need to hear it from someone else.

⭐ Don’t join too many reading challenges

Reading is supposed to be fun and not a chore, so don’t join more reading challenges than you can cope with and end up feeling overwhelmed. Choose the ones you want to join wisely, and I honestly would suggest you don’t join more than four.

If you find yourself reading books in order to check off a reading challenge prompt and not because you really want to read or you’re enjoying the book, then it might be time to reprioritise.

⭐ Don’t join if you don’t want to

This might sound anticlimactic since this is a post about reading challenges. But as a reader, sometimes we feel pressured into joining challenges or other bookish activities when we don’t to or we are more of mood readers who can’t really stick to a theme. In that case, it’s okay to just read whatever you want. Again reading is supposed to be fun and not a chore.

⭐ Create your own

You can create your own personal reading challenge if you don’t find any that works for you. Just choose a focus of your reading challenge – eg, read books you own, read a particular genre or a particular author’s books, finish most of the series you started, put pieces of paper with the books in your TBR in a jar and pick one at random each month, read one book from each country, read anthologies, etc. The possibilities are endless, the goal is to cultivate your reading habit and have fun with it.

⭐ Fun with community

If you struggle with staying on track with your reading, joining a community might help and there are lots of reading challenges that come with a bookish community attached. Buddy reading or attending book discussions in these groups might encourage you to read more and stay on track with the reading challenge.

Would you be joining any of these reading challenges? Are you a reading challenge person or do you just prefer to go with the flow? Let me know in the comments. I love chatting with you all 😊.

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