After completing my reading challenge of 2021, I feel like nothing can stop me, so here are several projects and challenges for 2022!

MWJ Awards project

The Mystery Writers of Japan Awards are presented every year by the Mystery Writers of Japan, an association founded by Edogawa Rampo in 1947. The awards started in 1948 and honour the best works in three categories (though this changed over the years): long fiction, short fiction and critical work.

As a fan of crime fiction, I thought it would be fun to work my way through the list of award winners and read them all (as far as possible) in chronological order.

This is not a yearly reading challenge, but rather a reading project that will keep me company for a long time.

I made a Notion page especially for this project. Feel free to visit it if you want to join me in this adventure! I will update the page as I read, and you can also use the template if you want to participate too, or use it as an inspiration to create your own reading challenge. Here are the links:

• Template page you can use to join the challenge. You can copy this page to your own Notion by choosing “duplicate page”.
• My own page where I will be updating my progress.

If you are not interested in this particular challenge but want to use a similar layout to record your readings, you can copy the template, delete the contents of the database and create your own entries.

Here is a quick overview of how the page works: (I haven’t read any of these books yet! It’s just a simulation to show how the page works.)

On the page, you will find the list of all the prize winners in chronological order. The older publications are out of print, but for the most part, there is an electronic version available on sites like Bookwalker or Booklive. I started to research the availability of the first books. If I have found it on Bookwalker, I linked to it in the book’s page, otherwise, I marked them as ”unavailable”. I only did this for the first entries, so it’s still a work in progress.

When you start a book, just enter the starting date in ”started”. If a book has a started date but no finished date, it will automatically appear in the ”currently reading” section.

When you finish a book, just add a ”finished” date and a rating. Once a finished date is given, the book will disappear from the ”currently reading” section and appear on the ”read so far” list.

In each book’s page, you will find a DNF checkbox. If you check it, the book will disappear from the ”currently reading” section and stop haunting you forever.

The ”book review” is the place where I will link to my blog.

This is the list:

Here is the ”currently reading” section. It will display the cover of the book. Only the books with a started date and no finished date appear here:

This is the ”read so far” section. Once a book has a finished date, it moves here:

Finally, I have added a timeline and board view where the books are classified by rating.

Note: There might be mistakes in the list, of course. I know that the cover does not always correspond to the digital version, and I realised too late that the auto-correction was enabled on my ipad, so it might have messed up with the transcriptions of the authors’ name. I’ll correct any mistake in the template when I see them.

Reading journal

I will be using a physical reading journal in 2022 🥰 I won’t make monthly spreads or decorate each page, it will mostly be used for loose notes about the books I read (summaries, review drafts, vocabulary, etc.). I just used the first pages to list all my challenges, I will complete them as I go.

#2022tlreadingchallenge

I am participating in the 2022 Target Language Reading Challenge created by @studywithkat on Twitter. I want to read more in Korean, so I will be joining this challenge for Korean only. It will be one Korean book per month, and I will do my best to follow the prompts 🙂

Read in more languages

I also want to read in more languages, including English, German and Spanish. I feel confident reading in German, but I haven’t touched Spanish since school, so reading books in Spanish will be a fun challenge.

20th Century reading challenge

And finally, I thought it could be fun to read my way through the 20th Century. I will try to read at least one book set in each decade. The book could be in any language and the story must be influenced by the social or political background of the chosen decade.

And that’s it!

I wish you all the best for 2022 ❤️