Goodreads.com announced the Reading Challenge for 2011. It is an interesting concept and, has the requisite bells and whistles around allowing widgets that display how much of the challenge is being achieved. Since every individual member gets to choose a number ie. the challenge, it is good fun. I see a couple of folks on my friends list putting up their challenges.

I toyed with the idea of putting up a number. And, enough dilly-dallying later I think this isn't something that suits my way of doing things. There are a couple of reasons and, I'll try to put them out in some unordered fashion.

• I don't read books with a net number of books per year to be read in mind. Which is why my book reading pattern,trends and habits are unusual. An example could be the fascination with one specific author and, the need to end up reading a large part of his/her works.
• The statistics don't lend themselves to any sort of challenge. In this specific month, I've ended up reading 16 books (new) with a bunch of re-reads thrown in here and there. This isn't going to be the number every month. And, even if I say that I do around 8 books for the remaining 11 months, I'd have gone through a 104 new books. Umm... I don't think that's going to happen. Last year, as per the stats, I read 41 new books. So clearly, there is a wide variation - the difference between projected and actual being more than double the actual.
• On the Goodreads bookshelf I tend to put in everything I read. So, that actually is a bit of a 'cheating'. For example, books by Sherry Turkle. Technically, that's neither fiction, nor non-fiction and, it shouldn't be sitting there on the bookshelf. But I do end up slipping these in because the shelves are then a real representation of what I've read.

So, that's more or less the list of things that's putting me off taking up a challenge.