What's In A Challenge?

I'm someone who loves a good challenge. I also have a bit of habit of giving myself ridiculously big challenges to complete in, sometimes, too short a time period; like running a certain number of kilometres in a given time period (more often my muscles will end up putting a stop to my over ambitious attempts). In a way, these challenges have become bucket list items for me; things I want to do before I die. I'm going to write a series of posts about the challenges I want to complete by the end of 2018, or in the case of the third one, before the end of my life as I'm not mentally or physically fit enough to run anything further than about 5 kilometres (3.11 miles) at the moment and I'm hoping to manage 10 kilometres (6.21 miles) by the end of the year, but more on that in a later post.

The first challenge I've set for myself is to read 52 books in 2018. So far, I've read 26 books so far and because I've been reading a few longer books recently I've fallen behind by a week or so. Hopefully I'll pick the pace up over the next few days and weeks. Given that my GoodReads account has been helping me keep on track with my reading challenge, and it with through them that I decided to start my reading challenge (given it was me who decided to read 52 books this year). Its something that I ended up decided to do when I bought my Kindle Paperwhite a few months ago.

Having bought a Kindle Paperwhite back in February, I have discovered, with surprise, that it has been a very good investment and well worth its weight in gold. Having a Kindle is a huge blessing as it means I can carry around those bigger, longer books (that often weigh quite a lot) with me without them taking up a lot of room or making my bag too heavy (its already really heavy as it is, due to all the stuff I already carry around in it). I still love reading the "old fashioned" paper books as they have a unique smell that I find can't be replicated in anything. I also love being able to physically turn the page of the book I'm reading. These two things I do miss about reading my books on Kindle but I'm grateful to be able to travel around and have a book or three with me.