The HRCYED (Hardest Reading Challenge You’ll Ever Do) 2.0 version is coming to an end for me. I started a little early last year (on June 26, 2025), so my challenge has just another day or so left as I’m writing this but since I won’t get any other books finished to add to it, let’s have a look at how I did.

In full disclosure, I did not think I would come close to finishing this challenge, but the point of it was to read more titles I wouldn’t normally have picked up and to expand my choice of topics, authors and themes. By that definition, it was a success!

If you’re interested, you can see the list of books I completed for the challenge here. I think the number of books if you read one title for each of the prompts was something like 225? Anyway, I managed 54 books over that 12-month period. I found several new-to-me authors I really enjoyed, picked up some books (especially in translation) I would not have given a second look, and read several BIPOC and LGBTQ+ books that I likely would have allowed to languish on my TBR.

Things I Learned from HRCYED 2.0:

1. Once I gave myself permission to “fail” at this, I found it was a lot more enjoyable!
2. I did not enjoy trying to find things to fit the “adaptations” prompt where we were supposed to look for TV shows, miniseries, YouTube programming, movies that were productions of books. I think I got through one of those. I watch so little these days, that one really felt like a slog that wasn’t a good choice for me.
3. I enjoyed the translated titles I read a lot more than I thought I would, so I would like to pick up a few more of those in the next year to continue that trend.
4. I started out strong over in the Discord group but ultimately with… 2000? More? People over there, I got overwhelmed and decided that was not how I wanted to spend my time. No shade for anyone who loved all of that discussion – it just wasn’t for me.
5. Because I started out the challenge with a “no stress” approach, while the first half or so of titles I read fit easily into a prompt, I wasn’t really organized enough to look for book options after those easy cherry-picked choice were filled in. So that brings me to….

HRCYED 3.0: I waffled a lot about whether I was going to participate in the 3.0 version (which runs from July 2026 to July 2027). I have decided I am going to give it a go for this year with a slightly different approach. I’m going to continue with a “low stress” approach where I’m not going to try to read all 155 prompts but I AM going to try to do better at organizing a tracker around the prompts for this upcoming year. I like that Stephanie (the organizer) has dropped some of the prompts I wasn’t crazy about and replaced those with one that sound very fun. This year feels like a better mix of flexible and structured in terms of how I read, so I’m going to give it a go!

If you participated in 2.0, are you participating in 3.0? Or how did 2.0 work for you?