Book Awards and Reading Challenges

Published on 31 May 2025

A few weeks ago, while enjoying a month off in-between jobs, I finally visited the Baltic Sea. It has been on my to-visit list for years and I both wanted to try to do some solo-travelling without any work mixed in. There were gorgeous beach-side towns, national parks with accessible hiking trails, bike paths through the more remote areas, restaurant options galore, and affordable hotels because it wasn't tourist season. The trip ended up being a truly rewarding experience that made me feel more confident in my ability to be immersed solely in German, and I got a glimpse into why so many people holiday in the region. As there was no work mixed in, I didn't take my laptop, and as you do when you're on trains for extended periods, you devour some books. In an effort to prove to myself that I still read "plenty" of books, the year before I'd decided to attempt the Reddit r/fantasy Bingo challenge. The goal of the challenge is to read 25 works of speculative fiction, with each work having to tick some box, where each book can only be used to fill a single box. These boxes have themes such an "main character is an orc / troll / goblin", "published in the 1990s", "set in a small town", etc. They're essentially there to get one to read a wider variety of things than one would normally read. I am a huge fan of this! A personal difficulty of the challenge is that I resent when I feel constrained in choice while looking for the next book to read, so I actively needed to avoid thinking of the challenge too much throughout the year. Essentially I dislike ever turning what I consider a hobby into what my brain can twist into construing as a chore or a to-do. The challenge also turned a bit into a point of pride, in that I struggle with the acknowledgement that reading 25 books (not including series and webnovel updates!) is now not necessarily something that I do in a year, especially so when considering that the books need to fit in some predefined bingo slots. Those used to be rookie numbers, yet now are apparently not something to take for granted....... Regardless, with a bit of help from the month off I actually finished the challenge! It is an incredibly minor thing, and I achieved it with only a week or two left before the year's deadline, but that sweet satisfying feeling of reward and victory was still there. I'm hoping that I can also complete the challenge this year, doubly so because I think it's a beautiful easy way to interact with the reading community that encourages me to explore spaces in fantasy that I otherwise would probably miss.

Why was the anecdote of a holiday at the Baltic Sea necessary for talking about a reading challenge on Reddit? It was not! It will give some context into the next topic though. In general I keep my doom scrolling contained to my laptop, with a nice separation from my phone. I also often need a small downtime in between finishing one a book and starting another. That resulted into me staring at the sea some evening, not really sure what to do with the last hour or two before going to bed. At some point after the dark and cold both started encroaching on uncomfortable, I ended up pulling out my phone and looking at some other book review websites. That quickly ended up in an odd combination of motivation, envy, inspiration, and ideas, and started a dive down a small rabbit-hole. There are so many good book review websites out there! The reviewers are often incredible writers, with their reviews having a quality that I can only approach on the best of days. They also often manage to read and review an obscene amount of books, which frankly amazes me. I ended up the next day on the train looking further into one site that I truly connected with. That site (https://sffbookreview.wordpress.com/) has in-depth blog posts containing their thoughts on the Hugo award voting, and eventual nominees. Despite being an avid fantasy reader, the intricacies of the different book awards has remained a mystery to me, with the only property that I was concretely aware of being some circle that appears on the cover. Reading someone passionately rant about the awards, the surrounding community, and their importance, got me a bit hooked and interested. I looked into it and was surprised that the longest running award is actually voted for by fans, and that there's actually relatively few fan votes (a few thousand). Furthermore, there is an entire community that I never knew existed, despite our shared interest intersecting near entirely. There does seem to be a $50 entry barrier for voting, but this apparently gets you epubs of all nominees, which I consider a fair system. I am still unsure if I will vote next year (already too late this year), but I am strongly considering because this is another small way to contribute to the community and encourage myself to read a wider variety of works.