Day Fourteen’s Challenge:
Read for pleasure and personal growth.
Today you need to grab a book or magazine and maybe a cup of tea or a glass of wine and sit and read for at least 1/2 hour. That’s today’s challenge: read for pleasure or personal growth. I’m not talking about sitting down with the company’s financial report (unless you find that pleasurable reading) or reading Green Eggs and Ham for the zillionth time to your children. Pick a book you want to read – whether trashy romance or historic fiction or one of the classics. Whatever suits you.
There are two kinds of reading that I like to do on a regular basis: pleasure and personal growth. Sometimes I’m reading from each genre in a given day, and sometimes I’m totally sucked into the book (especially pleasure reading titles) and read nothing else until I finish the current title. I don’t count the reading of web articles and blog posts as reading; obviously there are words and I’m technically reading them, but a book (usually) has much more depth and content than the shorter pieces found on the web. Don’t get me wrong, I read plenty of stuff off the web in addition to books, but I like to sit down with a physical book or e-reader and focus my attention on the book. Web reading is too easily distracted by email chirps and Facebook notifications.
Personal growth reading I think is necessary, as the name suggests, to keep growing mentally and spiritually as a person. While self-help books can fall into this category, there are a plethora of other genres as well: health and wellness, financial advice, and spiritual topics are examples.
I read from a fairly wide range of fiction (and non-fiction) genres, so my list of favorites is quite diverse. And I use the term favorites loosely because it’s really hard to narrow down to just a few titles! By the way, a good way to keep track of what you read is with Goodreads. You can log in, rate, and even review books you’ve read. Anyhow, here’s my list of pleasure reads:
- To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee (Classic)
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
by Douglas Adams (Sci-Fi)
- The Devil in the White City: A Saga of Magic and Murder at the Fair that Changed America
by Erik Larson (true story of 1893 Chicago’s World Fair)
- The Art of Racing in the Rain
by Garth Stein (have tissues handy)
- Before I Go
by Colleen Oakley (also have tissues handy)
- The Story of Beautiful Girl
by Rachel Simon (tugs at the heartstrings)
Check out my list in resources for my personal growth recommendations.
[All book links there as well as on this page are Amazon affiliate links. I receive a small commission from each sale, but it doesn’t cost you anything! So thank you for using the links to get to Amazon.com]
So what’s on your reading list?
Previous Day’s Challenge: De-clutter Next Day’s Challenge: Reconnect
See all available challenges
