HRCYED 3.0: The Third Year of Hardest Reading Challenge You’ve Ever Done

HRCYED round 3, let’s go!! Yeah! I’m so hyped! Too hyped if you ask me. After I took a break from participating in the Hardest Reading Challenge You’ve Ever Done, I wasn’t planning on returning to it. But then I watched the announcement video. This year’s theme is customisation, and while my toxic trait is to believe I can totally read over 100 books in a year when I can barely go past 50, if I’m presented with an option to succeed while reading less, then count me in.

HRCYED is bigger than ever. Last year’s, or the second round, was when the challenge gained more attention and also when I decided to not participate. My blog posts about this reading challenge also started to get more views, which well indicates how much the challenge was growing. And I’m really excited for Stephanie, how a silly reading challenge grew to such a big community. And I’m happy this year I’ll once again be part of it.

I know I have a complicated relationship with readathons. But I want to try to ignite the fire that I had with the Whateverathon back in 2022. So I’m doing an action plan and choosing the books for each prompt ahead of time. If I know from the start all the books that I need to read to complete the challenge, then maybe I’ll be more motivated because I can see how to win. Also, I’m going to be able to focus on my TBR this year, which was a big problem in my first year of HRCYED.

So what is this thing of customisation? For HRCYED 3.0, you can complete the readathon in three different ways: the traditional one, the ain’t-nobody-got-time-for-that version, and the gamefication version. There’s also the kids’ version, which is simpler and, as the name suggests, for children. I’ll leave a link to the page dedicated to the kids’ prompts here if you are interested. The gamification version of HRCYED is the traditional one, plus rolling a dice to add an extra layer of challenge to the prompt. I was very tempted by this version. Again, my toxic trait is showing. But I decided to be realistic and chose the ain’t-nobody-got-that-for-that version.

Ain’t-nobody-got-time-for-that rules

In the ain’t-nobody-got-time-for-that version, or ANGTFT for short, the rules are more or less the same as the traditional or no-nonsense version.

• Each book can count up to two different prompts
• DNFs don’t count
• And rereading is allowed if the book was last read over 5 years ago

However, the major difference is that I only need to read one book per prompt. That’s it. I read a book that fits a prompt, and the prompt is done. This means I only have to read 25 books in the span of a year. That’s totally doable for me. We are halfway through the year, and I have already read over half of that. And this time, I can make more use of the books on my TBR. So all the stars are aligning for this to be a good readathon.

While I only need to read one book per prompt, some prompts require connecting different books, and I don’t want to lose that. So I’m opening some exceptions.

• Book-ception: read a book mentioned in another book
  • If I just read one book, that wouldn’t be so fun and wouldn’t be a true book-ception
• Characters to authors: take a main character’s name and find an author with the same first name
  • I can’t do this if I don’t match at least one character name to an author. Just one. I don’t need more.
• Shiritori: this is to build a chain of five books by taking the last letter of the title to be the first letter of the next book
  • This sounds so much fun that I don’t want to do just one or two books, I want to do all five!
• An anthology of authors: read an anthology and then read books by the authors in that anthology
  • Again, for this prompt to make sense, I need to read two books: an anthology and then one of the authors.

Once again, there are white and purple prompts, and apart from the four that I just mentioned, I only need to read one book for the following prompts to add a cross on my bingo board.

• Choose your party: based on the classes from D&D, I need to read a book where a character’s profession matches one of those classes. Here is a link to the classes and an example of the professions
• Periodic Table: read a book with an element on the cover (this is going to be hard)
• Familial Terms: a book with a familial term in the title
• Traipsing Through Regions: read from a different region in the world. It can be a natural region or a cultural one
• Choose your curriculum: choose a school subject and read books about it. Fiction is allowed
• US Road Trip: books set in different states or in different countries, as long as it isn’t a major city/province/state/prefecture…
• Not-so-secret Prompts Anymore: based on last year’s HRCYED monthly secret prompts
• Cover styles: choose a style of cover, like illustrated romance covers or movie tie-in covers, cover with real people or only text…
• Titular counting: count the number of words in a title from 1 to 10 (maybe I could do a very long title)
• HRCYED Mashup: Join two promps from HRCYED 1.0 and HRCYED 2.0
• Numerical titles: books with numbers in the title
• A Rainbow of Words: books with colours in the title
• Animal Families: read books with different kinds of animals on the cover
• Biomes: read books with different landscapes on the cover
• Re-re-remix: basically retellings and adjacent stories as long as it’s a variation of another story
• Food Pyramid: books with different food groups on the cover
• Weather covers: weather and nature events on the cover
• It’s Your Birthday: it’s my birthday, I decide, from birthstones, to flowers, to zodiac signs, to even books published in my birth month
• Backlist Author: read books by your favourite author you haven’t read yet
• I Must Endeavor to Aquire These Creatures: like Pokémon, read books from different types like grass, water, dark…
• Second chance & Hidden gems: previous DNF’s, ugly covers, low ratings, random books…

Time to plan my reading

Since this time, I’ll get to play more with my TBR, I want to make a little action plan. One of the things I did even before deciding to do the Whateverthon was to see if I could make bingo. Even before the readathon started, I already had a book for each square in the bingo board. So, “to win”, I only had to read that list of books. And maybe that’s what I’m missing. I need a plan where I can see from the start that I can succeed.

The Periodic Table and the Anthology prompt are the only ones that I don’t have any plans for. I have an anthology I could read and would count as a Second Chance, but I don’t have any books by any of the authors. So I will have to buy new books. Other prompts like Road Trip, Book-ception and Characters to Authors are conditioned on what’s inside the book, so it’s hard to make plans without reading some books. And for HRCYED Mashup, I chose Seasons and Translations as my prompts. I already have The Sandman by Lars Keppler and The Healing Season of Pottery by Yeon Somin as candidates, but only by reading them will I know if they can count.

The books I’m already sure I’ll be reading, and counting, are:

1. The Sixth Faction by Veronica Roth: It comes out in October (my birthday month) and is a Re-re-remix of Divergent if Tris chose a different faction
2. Beartown by Frederik Backman: it counts as reading the author’s Backlist
3. Theodora’s Tea Shop by Christy Anne Jones: Yes, I’m a viewer and curious to read her book. Plus, it’s about witches, which counts for the Choose Your Party prompt, and it has a bird on the cover for Animal Families.
4. Last One to Lie by J M Winchester: for the Numerical Titles and to clear by list of ARCs yet to read (too bad that’s not a prompt)
5. Waking Nightmare by Carly Anne West: there’s a big bloody pork rib on the cover, perfect for the Food Pyramid, and since it’s short, I can also read it outside and count for one of the Not-so-secret Prompts.
6. A Perfect Story by Elizabet Benavent: if it’s set in Madrid and I can’t count it for the Road Trip, I choose it as my Curriculum to learn Spanish
7. The Cruise Ship Lost my Daughter by Morgan Mayer: this is another ARC I haven’t read yet, and maybe the only book I have with Familial Terms
8. Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson: I already started reading this book, and I’m not even a quarter of the way in, so it will be perfect for a Rainbow of Words
9. Friend Request by Laura Marshall: the cover is underwater, so maybe I can catch a water-type Pokémon in there
10. The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin: my edition, as on the cover, not one but two Biomes, and I’ve been meaning to read it for a long time
11. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov: I want to read this book this year, and I might count it for Cover Styles just so it doesn’t go to waste.
12. Insurgent/Allegiant by Veronica Roth: I’m doing a reread to get ready for the new book, and since I read both back in 2016, I can add them to the readathon as Road Trip books. If my memory serves me right, the Divergent series is set in Chicago. Either way, I’m reading the whole series and will try to fit them into the readathon if I can.

There are a couple of prompts that I’m still missing, but I’ll try to fit them into the books I plan on reading or others that I read along the way. There are so many prompts that this whole planning is becoming a bit overwhelming. I also have to keep in mind that this is a yearlong readathon, and the list of books that I already have here is a great place to start.

Why I’m coming back to HRCYED

Somewhere along the way, I lost my reading habit. I’ve mentioned this in other posts that I need to get my reading habit back. But month after month, nothing changes. I tried to get back to reading trackers, but they are an unnecessary pressure and a burden to always have to have on hand. As if I can’t read a book without my phone. It’s annoying. Modern life really robs us of the things we love the most. And I don’t want to read more to brag about it. I don’t want to read more to achieve my Goodreads goal. I want to read more because I know how good it feels. I miss that obsession that would make me read a book in 2 days. I miss that satisfying feeling of making big progress in a book. Any 5 pages read is progress, and is much more than the majority of people read. However, for me, it’s not enough to feel the pleasure of the experience.

And I think the biggest culprit is how we are training our attention. I don’t think our attention span is shortening. We are simply crows being distracted by many glistening things at once. So there isn’t any time left to look at anything else. I know I’m not alone when every night I go to battle against myself, whether I should watch another episode or pick up a book. Whether I should read my book or search for that random thought on my phone. Just like a child prefers the overly sweet taste of empty nutrition of ice cream instead of the mild sweetness of a nutritious piece of fruit, so our brains crave what gives the most gratification in the fastest way possible. Books are the fruit, and our phones/TV/tablets are the ice cream. And we can only eat so much ice cream until it becomes bad for our health.

So, I’m going to use HRCYED as a motive to choose my books over my phone. To use the community aspect to make it accountable. And to slow down. At the end of the day, that’s what we all need to do. To slow down. Doing the ANGTFT version is a way to have minimal pressure while feeling accomplished. I can see that it’s doable for me, and maybe that excitement will translate into setting aside more time each day to read.