Every year, Tim Challies (my favorite blogger and never-ending source for Kindle deals) puts out a reading challenge for Christians. It’s designed to help you track your reading, read more, and read a wider variety of literature. It’s divided into four distinct plans - the light reader (13 books), avid reader (26 books), committed reader (52 books), and obsessed reader (104 books). The idea is that you pick a plan and try to complete it by the end of 2019. If you complete your goal before the year is up, then you try to finish the next plan.

My favorite part about the plan is that Tim Challies doesn’t assign each book - he assigns a category and allows you to pick a book of your own choice from that category. For example, the first book was a biography, so I read a short biography of C.S. Lewis.

This year, my goal is to get through the avid reader plan. That means by the end of 2019 I want to have read 26 books from the list. This amounts to about a book every other week (I know this because Challies helpfully tells you what pace you will have to read at to complete each plan in a year).

Last year, it was my goal to get through the committed reader plan, but schoolwork quickly crushed that dream and I gave up entirely. So this year i’ve decided to be a little more realistic and set a goal to complete the avid reader plan. Thus far, I’ve read three books and am working on a fourth - which means I am currently on schedule to complete my goal! The books have been A Life Inspired: C.S. Lewis by Christopher Gordon (a biography), The Book of the Dun Cow by Walter Wangerin Jr. (a novel), and Devoted to the Service of the Temple: Piety, Persecution, and Ministry in the Writings of Hercules Collins by Michael A. G. Haykin and Stever Weaver (a book about history). I’m currently working on Damsels in Distress: Biblical Solutions for Problems Women Face by Martha Peace (a book targeted at the opposite gender).

My plan for the rest of 2019 is to write a short blog post on each of the books I read for this challenge. It won’t be anything extensive - just a quick summary, some things I liked and disliked about the book, and a few favorite quotes.

I don’t want to do it alone, though! I’d love to have you all join me. I know it’s a bit late into January, but there’s still time to commit to both the light or avid reader plans! If you’d like to do this challenge with me, I want you to do four things.

Follow this link to download the Tim Challies 2019 Reading Challenge.
Follow me on Twitter @1689Millennial and let me know you’re doing the challenge.
Subscribe to the blog to get reading challenge updates delivered right to your inbox so you can keep up with what I’m reading and let me know what you’re reading!
Share this post so others can join us!

Looking forward to reading with all of you!