The last reading challenge I did was in 2015 — I didn’t come anywhere near completing the 52 books on that list and I found it frustrating to always try and fit what I read into that list but it did expose me to things I would not have otherwise selected.
This year, I am going to dive into Book Riot’s Read Harder challenge. It’s their fourth kick at the can. There are 24 categories to fill — much more achievable to me than the 52-category challenge — and only a couple make me nervous.
Right off the top I thought I would have trouble with a book published posthumously but a quick google search revealed one that has been teetering on my large TBR* pile for quite some time, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. This book would also fit in two other categories (5. book set in a BRICS country and 19. translated genre fiction.) so if I find another book that fills the posthumous category I can shift this one.
some of the books I intend to read for this challenge including true crime and essays
The Oprah Book Club selection was making me wince a little because I have consciously avoided almost everything on there, but Love in the Time of Cholera is on that list which is also in my TBR pile so I might be able to do that one too. The only other one that I can’t make a good decision about is the Western. I read Shane for one of my History classes, and I have read a couple of other westerns long ago plus Brokeback Mountain not-so-long-ago, but I’m very open to suggestion on this category as it is really not a familiar one. I would especially love to find a western written by a First Nations author or at least with a non-white protagonist.
Also, if anyone knows of a great “book with a female protagonist over the age of 60″ — throw me that title! That’s one I’m finding challenging. However if I cannot find anything on my own shelves, I have the catalogs of both the GVPL and the UVic Libraries to comb, and Interlibrary Loans beyond that… not to mention the many lovely bookstores in this town…
just a few of my own books…
If you want to follow along, I will be tracking my possible reads in a Google Doc and my progress tagged 2018-readharder on my Goodreads account.
*TBR pile = To Be Read pile. It’s more of a mountain, really.