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Meeting the Challenge
January 1, 2010
I did something new with my reading list last year; I participated in an A to Z title challenge along with some of my online friends. We aimed to read at least one title for each letter of the alphabet in 2009. (The rules had more specifics; Teena, who did this challenge with me, posted them in her entry about it, which some of you have no doubt already seen, so I won’t restate them here.) I thought I’d successfully completed the challenge over the first weekend in December, but when I was going back over my list in preparation for writing an entry about it, I realized that I’d actually read two of the books in 2008—I wasn’t done! Fortunately there was still enough time left in the year for me to correct that oversight, which I did, finishing the last of the 26 books yesterday morning. Here’s my list of challenge titles:
A—Alex and Me, Irene M. Pepperberg
B—Bitter is the New Black, Jen Lancaster
C—Childish Things, Marita van der Vyver, translated by Madeline Biljon
D—The Dart League King, Keith Lee Morris
E—E: A Novel, Matt Beaumont
F—The Fabulous Lunts, Jared Brown
G—The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman
H—Hostage to Pleasure, Nalini Singh
I—Inkspell, Cornelia Funke
J—Jacob, Jacquelyn Frank
K—Kiss of a Demon King, Kresley Cole
L—Last Shot, John Feinstein
M—Master of Obsidian, Jamie Craig
N—Nerve Damage, Peter Abrahams
O—One Good Turn, Kate Atkinson
P—The Pickup, Nadine Gordimer
Q—Q Road, Bonnie Jo Campbell
R—Russian Disco, Wladimir Kaminer, translated by Michael Hulse
S—Sundays at Tiffany’s, James Patterson & Gabrielle Charbonnet
T—Time Won’t Let Me, Bill Scheft
U—Unveiled, Jamie Craig
V—Vengeance, Stuart M. Kaminsky
W—Wicked, Gregory Maguire
X—The X-Factor, George Plimpton
Y—Year of Wonders, Geraldine Brooks
Z—Zapped, Carol Higgins Clark
Like Teena said in her entry, this challenge got me to pick up books I wouldn’t have otherwise tried. Some of them I put back down after a few chapters, but some of them I finished and really enjoyed, like Q Road and Year of Wonders. Over the years I’ve been keeping this online journal, I’ve gotten myself back into the habit of reading books (at the expense of magazines, as it’s turned out) and this challenge was a nice way to tweak that habit a little (the challenge books made up not quite half of my total titles read for the year). In 2010, I’m going to do A to Z authors.
On this date in 2009: Happy 2009
2008: The Beginning
2007: Good Clutter
2006: Done and Undone
2005: The Shoe Said “Love”
2004: No entry
2003: No entry
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2 Comments
January 5th, 2010 at 10:48 pm
What did you think of Year of Wonders? After reading People of the Book by the same author, I picked up Year of Wonders too, but it’s still sitting in my To Read Someday pile….
January 6th, 2010 at 12:29 pm
I ended up liking even though I was at first not sure that a novel about the plague would be up my alley but the horrific parts were handled in a such a way that I kept reading. The last several chapters seemed to belong to a different book, though–I wasn’t satisfied with them at all.