2015 Reading Challenges

I’m pondering trying some reading challenges this year. It’s not that I don’t read a lot – I hit 169 this past year, although I usually average about 110), but I’d like to broaden my reading scope a bit. So, playing up the Librarian part of my title, I included a GoodReads widget in my sidebar, and will see if I can successfully track two reading challenges here:

Nonfiction Challenge – I’m choosing to enter at the Seeker level, 11-15 titles: SUCCESS! 12 nonfiction titles completed.

1. The Secret History of Wonder Woman (done, 2/6)

2. Wonder Woman Unbound: The Curious History of the World’s Most Famous Heroine (done, 2/3)

3. When Books Went to War: Books That Helped Us Win World War II (done, 5/25)

4. Start a Revolution: Stop Acting Like a Library (done, 10/15)

5. Always on Sunday: Ed Sullivan, An Inside View (done, 1/25)

6. Pioneer Girl, The Annotated Autobiography (done, 2/1)

7. Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It (done, 6/15)

8. How to Be a Heroine: What I Learned From Reading Too Much (done, 3/15)

9. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (done, 1/11)

10. No Drama Discipline (done 2/8)

11. Wild Things: Acts of Mischief in Children’s Literature (done, 1/15)

12. 1939: The Making of Six Great Films from Hollywood’s Greatest Year (done 4/15)

and the TBR Pile Challenge, to knock off some of the 95 titles living on my To Be Read Shelf: DONE! I read four books in the final 3 days of December, ha.

1. At Home, A Short History of Private Life (2010) (done, 1/24)
2. The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride (2009) (done, 12/31)
3. Through Lover’s Lane: LM Montgomery’s Photography and Visual Imagination (2007) (done, 10/15)
4. Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society (2007) (done, 5/30)
5. The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England (2008) (done 12/29)
6. Must Have Done Something Good (2008) (done 1/20)
7. Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street (2008) (done 9/20)
8. Below Stairs: The Classic Kitchen Maid’s Memoir That Inspired “Upstairs, Downstairs” and “Downton Abbey” (1968) (done, 12/30)
9. Jamestown (2007) (done 12/29)
10. Dreaming of Dior: Every Dress Tells a Story (2009) (done, 2/14)
11. Maud Hart Lovelace’s Deep Valley: A Guidebook of Mankato Places in the Betsy-Tacy Series (2002) (done, 3/28)
12. Janie Face to Face (2013)  (done, 3/15)

Alternates:
1. White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickenson and Thomas Wentworth Higgenson (2008) DNF: Boring
2. To Be Queen: A Novel of the Early Life of Eleanor of Aquitaine (2011)
3.  Twilight at the World of Tomorrow : Genius, Madness, Murder, and the 1939 World’s Fair on the Brink of War (2010)                                                           4. The Other Side of the Night: The Carpathia, the Californian and the Night the Titanic Was Lost (2009)

Hmm hmm hmm. That’s a lot of history, which is not exactly broadening my scope! But it’s all history I’m interested in? Geez, what other kind of nonfiction IS there? I have a clear narrative bias happening here. I maybe need to investigate this more – although at least the nonfiction challenges doesn’t ask for a list of titles up front, so that list can change throughout the year. Anyone have any non-narrative nonfiction recommendations?

To balance all that history, I’m also going to try for the Eclectic Reader Challenge: Success!! This was actually really fun, and only some of them were hard to find ideas for.

1. Retellings (of fairytale, legends or myth): West of the Moon (done 1/11)
2.  A book set in a country starting with the letter S (Scotland): Call the Nurse: True Stories of a Country Nurse on a Scottish Isle (done 6/26)
   
3.  PI Crime (fiction featuring a private investigator): Mr. Kiss and Tell (done, 2/8)
4.  A novel published before you were born: Time and Again (done, 6/9)
5. Contemporary romance: The Daddy Audition (done, 6/17)
   
6. Fiction for foodies: Better Than Chocolate (done, 12/10)
7. Microhistory (Non Fiction): One Summer: America 1927 (done, 3/15)
8. Science Fiction set in space: Captain Marvel (done, 2/23)
   
9. Sports (Fiction or Non fiction): Kammie on First: Baseball’s Dottie Kamenshek (done, 9/19)
   
10. Featuring diversity: Revolution (done 1/11)
11. Epistolary Fiction: Unusual Chickens for the Extraordinary Poultry Farmer (done 6/8)
12. Middle Grade/YA Adventure: Chasing Secrets (done, 9/13)
    

I think the hardest of those, for me, will be sports, ha. The rest are things I’d probably stumble on, but this will make me a little more intentional.

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December 2015 update: Success! 36 challenge books completed. And then there’s the other 250 books I read this year, because who would have guessed that I’d stumbled into a brand new genre and fall head over heels in love with graphic novels? That was a brand new direction for me, one that opened up a lot of genres and new experiences, so I guess I didn’t need the challenges after all. But they were fun to do, and I think I’m going to try them again. Even the To Be Read one.