The Reader’s Room Summer Reading Challenge

With just a few days to go until we officially end our March Madness challenge (winners will be announced in early July), we decided that it was time to announce our summer reading challenge! As you might have guessed by the image, we’ll be hosting a reading Olympics challenge. Keep reading to find out more. We hope you join in.

Book Worm and I are still working out all the rules and we will post them as soon as possible. Readers will be placed into teams and while most tasks will be done individually, you will work together with other teammates to rack up points for your team.

We will post a list of 2016 Olympic sports and each one will be matched up with book categories of our creation.  These sports will represent categories that will be played at this year’s summer Olympic games. Individual players may read a maximum of one book for each category but as a team, you can read multiple books for each category.

Picking a book is more complicated than just fitting it to the category. Teams must work together to pick one country to represent each category. This will be the country you are sponsoring in this category. Therefore, you must find a book written by an author from that country or a book set in that country.

The goal of the game is get as many points as possible for both yourself and your team. You get points by reading books and posting brief (1-3 sentence reviews on our challenge page). The number of points awarded for each completed read depends on how well your country does in the sports category. For example, if you pick your team picks U.S. for gymnastics you will get points based on how many medals they win for that sports category.

So why teams? You will be put into teams for a few reasons: 1) a few sports categories are team events and will require a certain number of people to complete a mutual goal and 2) should you choose, you can work together with your team to strategize which countries to pick. Individuals may only read one book for each category but multiple team members may read the same category. The caveat being that each team can pick a country only once in the game.  All prizes will be awarded on individual basis although the individual who wins depends in part on how the overall team performs. Think of the teams as a support system and not a source of pressure to read faster, or more, than your pace allows.

The challenge will officially begin July 15th and will run through September 15. If you want to participate, please sign up by July 10th so we can start setting up teams. We will try our best to create evenly matched teams (with a mix of fast and slower readers).

We will post the full rules on the challenge page we have created titled “Reading Olympics” in under our challenge menu tab.

So who is in? Book Worm and I may join in on one of your teams but we won’t be competing for the individual prizes. Let us know if you want to participate.