Completing the Hardest Reading Challenge (not really)

The Hardest Reading Challenge You’ve Ever Done is over!!… It ended two months ago, but oh well… I’m just now sitting down to write about it. My last update wasn’t very merry. Then I proceed to do a period of rereading for 3 months, give or take. Since rereads don’t count towards the HRCYED, I had nothing to update you on. So I stayed quiet.

Knowing that the challenge would be over when the calendar changed to July, I focused on the challenge one last time. And, at the very least, try to finish the books that I bought specifically for this readathon. But did I accomplish that?

Before doing my last update on HRCYED 2024-2025, the Hardest Reading Challenge is back for round 2. That’s right, HRCYED 2.0! I’m already two months behind on the announcement, although I couldn’t pass up doing a shout-out since more people are discovering the HRCYED, and that makes me happy. However, I will not be taking part this time. I still need a break from the last one. I’ll leave here the video announcement with all the rules and explanations on how it works this time. And if you take part, I hope you have lots of fun!

Now back to the scheduled program.

May

May was Asian Heritage Month, and it looked like the perfect opportunity to finally read The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin. With the new Netflix adaptation, this book came back to my mind once again (only three months after the release, and already it seems like it doesn’t even exist). I’ve been hearing people talking about The Tree-Body Problem for years, and May was finally the time I sat down and read it. And I loved it! I already have a review going over what I liked and also what I didn’t like.

Coincidentally, there was space for The Three-Body Problem in the HRCYED. It counted for an author from another country challenge, in this case China, and for the rainbow challenge, since the Portuguese edition, the one I read, has a purple cover.

Another book I finished in May was Refuse to Choose by Barbara Sher. The best book I read this year. I already have a doc with the title for the review, I promise it’s coming. And while neither one of these books was bought to be part of this challenge, luck had it, they would fit. Refuse to Choose, being a non-fiction book, was the last genre I was missing, which means I completed that challenge.

June

The final month. The last time. This is it. Can I finish the remaining two books I bought specifically for this readathon? Yes, she can, and she could.

I had on my shelves Capturing the Devil by Kerri Maniscalco, the last and final book in the Stalking Jack the Ripper series. Although I was still missing the third one, Escaping from Houdini. I wasn’t going to buy it now, especially in a time crunch. So I audiobooked it. And while it’s not my preferred method of reading, it’s nice to do something else, like a puzzle or crochet, while listening to an audiobook. And the increase in books read at the end of the month is also very satisfying. But with Escaping from Houdini finished, I could read how everything came to an end.

I really liked this series. I’m sad it took me this long to decide to read these books. They were so popular back in the day on Booktube, and now people probably don’t even know they exist. But they do deserve some love too. Oh, and I need to also thank Audrey Rose for the idea of adding rose to black tea. It’s so delicious and fragrant. I don’t want to drink anything else. But back to my point. This meant I completed a book series with 4 or more books. Another challenge under my belt.

And finally, my crown jewel. The one I feared the most. The book from my birth year: Blindness by José Saramago. This 344-page book seems quite harmless, except Saramago is Sally Rooney on steroids. If Roney’s lack of quotation marks annoys you, how about no quotations, no paragraphs, but in return a capital letter at the start of each character’s dialogue? Saramago writes quite dense books. The paragraph average length was about two and a half pages. Most authors will divide their scenes by chapter or do a double space to mark the separation of scenes. But Saramago just pressed the enter key once. Although I don’t mind his writing style. It gives the story a very particular feeling, as if you are sitting at a coffee shop with a friend while his telling you a story. I wasn’t following the characters. I was listening to the story of these characters. And that’s quite different. After all, he is the only Portuguese author to ever receive a Nobel Prize in Literature. There has to be a reason, right?

The final tally

And so the year-long readathon is finally over, and now it’s time to see how much I accomplished. From the 25 challenges I’ve completed 7. A little bit over a quarter of the challenge was complete. I was successful with reading an entire series with 4 or more books, the Stalking Jack the Ripper series by Kerri Maniscalco. I read 5 books set in or the author is from another country (US, UK and Canada not included): Obsidio by Jay Kristoff and Amy Kaufman (authors from Australia), Grapefruit Moon by Tomo Serizawa (set in Japan), Sentience Hazard by Alexandru Czimbor (Romanian author), Blasfamous by Mirka Andolfo (author from Italy), and The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin (set in China). Then read a book by a local author, Nem Todas as Baleias Voam by Afonso Cruz and a top 10 book of the year I was born, Blindness by José Saramago.

One of my biggest challenges was to finish 3 books in 24 hours, and I conquered it with the help of é urgente amar by Pedro Chagas Freitas, O Colar by Sophia de Mello Bryner Andresen, and Catarina e a Beleza de Matar Fascistas by Tiago Rodrigues. I also read one of the most famous crowdfunded book out there Tress of The Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson, and even managed to finish the genre challenge: Here Lies a Vengeful Bitch by Codie Crowley (fantasy), Obsidio by Jay Kristoff and Amy Kaufman (fantasy), His & Hers by Alice Feeney (Mystery/Thriller), Camp Lanier by Sylvester Barzey (horror), The Lesbiana’s Guide to Catholic School by Sonora Reyes (romance), Stalking Jack the Ripper by Kerrri Maniscalco (historical), Refuse to Choose by Barbara Sher (non-fiction), é urgente amar by Pedro Chagas Freitas (literary fiction).

Of all the other challenges, I was closest to finishing the rainbow one. The only colour I was missing was orange. There are plenty of books I read that have orange on the cover, although for all the other colours I choose covers that are primary that colour, so I prefer to take the L on this one. I was also just one protagonist’s name away from completing the challenge of reading 3 books with names of people I know. I was fortunate in the beginning to find two names without even looking for them.

The spell your name challenge was one that I did worse for myself than it needed to be. I wanted to spell my entire name (5 names total), and instead, I couldn’t even finish spelling my last name. I was two letters away from spelling my first and last name. This also coincides with the A to Z challenge. Of the 26 letters of the alphabet, I completed 17. I’m missing some of the hardest ones, like the ones at the end of the alphabet and other quite common ones like D and I. And those are also the ones missing from my name.

All the other challenges that I did some reading for were the LGBTQ+ ones, where I read 3 out of 7, the most common ones to find lesbian, gay and bi. I also read one of the lowest-rated books on my Goodreads TBR. I needed to read 4 more to complete the challenge. Also, I read an adaptation of a Sherlock Holmes mystery, but never went back to read the original. The New Releases challenge stopped halfway through when I began to feel tired of this whole readathon. And I only read 1 out of 4 books from the seasonal challenge.

There were also other challenges that I didn’t even touch, mostly because I had to buy more books instead of using the ones on my TBR, or they were hard to get my hands on. This was the biggest motivator for why I stopped catering my reading towards this readathon. I was reading books for this readathon instead of fitting the readathon into my reading. In the middle of books I didn’t want to read, I was finding the ones I didn’t want to read the least. I had to buy books when I didn’t want to grow my TBR. The readathon and my reading goals weren’t aligned with each other, and I had to accept that this reading challenge had a limit for me.

All the books read for HRCYED

Twenty-nine books. A year’s worth of books. It’s really not that bad. And with those 29, I completed a total of 79 prompts. That’s almost three prompts per book. I finished two series, read from authors I was very curious to try, and read books I’ve been hearing about for years. I found great stories, found others I would rather forget they exist. I read my first lesbian romance and possibly the only type of romance I want to read for the rest of my life. I read short books and big books, middle-grade stories to adult fiction. It was quite a diverse bag of books. It’s a good stack of books and I’m happy with it.

As I said at the beginning, HRCYED 2.0 is going on right now, but I’m not participating. Readathons are fun, especially when they bang on align with your reading. So I prefer not joining in on the HRCYED this time and instead go for other shorter readathons like TBR Harvest since that one will be focusing exclusively on reducing my TBR, something I urgently need to do.