Welcome to The 4 Rs Challenge! We created this challenge because we love getting recommendations for new books… almost as much as we like recommending our favorites to others! It’s minimal-commitment – only one book every three months, and if you’re busy, you don’t have to participate every round (although we hope you do!)
It’s based on LibraryThing’s SantaThing program – you tell people what you’re interested in, and they recommend books for you. Only, for this challenge, you get to pick which of your recommendations you most want to read!
There are five steps:
Step 1: Sign Up!
Head over to our forum and create a free account. In the current round’s category, start a new thread with your name as the title. In the first post, tell us a little bit about yourself, what you like to read, and what kind of recommendations you’d like to get (or what kind you really don’t want!) Provide links to your blog, LibraryThing catalog, or whatever you think will help other participants get a handle on your reading tastes and what you’ve already read.
Step 2: Recommend!
The most important step of the whole process! During the recommendations period, visit other people’s threads, take a look at their libraries and blogs, and tell them what books you think they’d really enjoy. To successfully complete the challenge, you have to leave recommendations for at least five other participants – try to balance things so that everybody has plenty of great recommendations to choose from.
Step 3: Read!
Look at the recommendations people have left on your thread, pick one book, and read it!
Step 4: Review!
Write a review of the book you read, and post it to your blog, your LibraryThing account, etc. (If you don’t have a blog, send us your review and we’ll post it here!) Leave a link to your review on the “Challenge completed!” thread for the current round – it’s how we’ll pick the winners when we do giveaways!
Step 5: Repeat!
The process repeats itself every three months. We’ll send out reminders when the next round’s sign-up period is open, and we hope to see you then!
The 4 Rs Challenge 