It’s February again and all the reading groups are choosing romantic stories for the monthly read.

That’s alright if you like Romance, but many of us give the genre a wide berth. There are ways around it of course. Mary Stewart wrote some excellent Mystery stories that generally have a potential love interest featuring highly in the plot and these are ultimately readable, even for Romance philistines like myself.

To be fair, many non-Romance stories have a relationship subplot worked in so it’s not impossible to find something to fit the theme without having to read ‘bodice rippers’ or soppy tear-jerkers with vapid protagonists.

This is just one example of expectations among the reader community, and especially in reader groups. One in particular that I follow is predictable in its monthly themes every year: January will have a story about new beginnings, February will have a love story, March and April can vary but May or June will have a vacation story. October is always spooky month and December is some form of holiday tale.

Reading themes can be fun to follow, but sometimes the expectations among readers can become almost like mob rule. Goodreads pushes its members to plan their reading for the year and declare a number of books to read in that time. It’s not required and a lot of readers do enjoy making their commitments early, but for those of us with a more haphazard style of choosing our next reads and variable reading time, it feels like being the odd one out, almost as if you’ve resisted the criteria of the popular group at school.

I don’t plan my reading ahead. If a book group is reading something I can’t get interested in, I don’t read the selection for that month, though I’ll usually give the Kindle sample a try to broaden my horizons. I’ve found some very enjoyable books that way, often suggested by group members with very different reading tastes than mine.

I try to keep the books that really interest me in the front of my Kindle Collections folders, but choosing what to start next has a definite random factor to it.

Having said that, I have found it amusing to participate in themed reads on occasion. Finding selections among my massive tbr pile to suit Bingo squares or alphabet challenges can be fun and pull out a lot of titles I’ve forgotten I have. Certain letters can be harder to fill and I have to admit, I’ve seriously considered starting a title with an X word to do my part in making these challenges that little bit easier for others.

More difficult is finding selections for books set in every state of the US or round the world challenges, and filling a Bingo square for ‘author of colour’ can be tricky as you don’t always know from a name what ethnic group an author might come from. It can take a little research to look up author information for a pile of books you  want to read, and too often it is the well known ones that get chosen, when my own preference is to discover lesser known authors.

Another form of expectations thrust onto readers is that ‘everyone’ will have read certain books. Popular ones, Classics often read in school or the latest celebrity autobiography that gets enough advertising to make readers feel like they’re the only ones who have missed out on this incredible gem until they comply and read it.

The power of advertising relies on this form of suggestive expectations. The question is, how often do you want to give in to it?

I’ll admit there have been a few books I’ve read after repeatedly hearing about them. The first of these was in high school, when everyone was reading The Lord of the Rings. However, overall I find it more enjoyable to set my own expectations and while I’ll participate in the occasional challenge, most of the time I prefer to keep my reading choices random.

How about you? Do you follow challenges and plan your books a year ahead? Let’s chat in the comments.

Jaq D Hawkins

Books available at:

Barnes & Noble

Smashwords

LULU – iTunes – KOBO

Amazon:

UK – USA – Canada – Australia