To kick of the New Year, I established a semester-long reading challenge. My cooperating librarian found a checklist on Pinterest on which we based this challenge. The list, originally published on Popsugar had lots of different criteria to help people find a book to read, such as “read a book with nonhuman characters,” and “a book written by a female author.” Many of the items on the list were unusual, and made me think about the fact that books have lots of different features beyond genre that we can use to decide what to read.

The challenge I developed asks students to read at least five leisure books during the spring semester that satisfy criteria from the list.  I made the list into a bookmark for students to fill out and submit in May for a chance to win a gift certificate to a local book store. All subsequent library book displays will be able to support this reading challenge.

We decorated the door to the library with some of the iterms from the list and books (available in the library) that would fulfill the criteria.

We also put together a New Year’s display that encouraged students to take out many of the self-improvement books in the library.

All of the books on display would satisfy one or more of the reading inspiration list.

We encouraged students to log their reading on GoodReads, and provided an conveneint QR code.