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| The books on my list that I already own. |
For
the past two years I have been challenging myself to read more books. In 2013 I
completed 38 books and this past year, 2014, I read a few less at 35. The first
year I tried this, I enjoyed the challenge and discovered some great books like
Ernest Cline's "Ready Player One" and Chbosky's "The Perks of
Being a Wallflower". I read all three Hunger Games books in as many days
and I indulged in the second installment of Margaret Atwood's incredible
MaddAddam trilogy. The idea of repeating this challenge at the beginning of
2014 was thrilling, and I was hoping I would enjoy it as much or more as I had
the previous year, but unfortunately this wasn't the case. Although the
beginning of the challenge was enjoyable, by the end I was reading, or
(probably more accurately) skimming, the shortest, quickest reads I could find
in order to get my numbers up; In essence, it took all of the joy out of
reading. That being said, I also read some amazing books such as Patrick
Rothfuss's King Killer Chronicles (the ones that have been released that is),
Zadie Smith's "White teeth" and I was able to complete the MaddAddam
trilogy. Near the end of the year I decided to re-read the entire Harry Potter
series, which I accomplished in about a month, and was really enjoyable but by
no means a challenge. By about Christmas, with 5 more books to complete the
challenge before the new year, I gave up.
For
2015 I decided to do the reading challenge a little bit differently, focusing
on the quality of the read instead of the quantity read. I settled on 25 books
for the year, so I can read about one every two weeks, with a little bit of
wiggle room since I am a full-time Pharmacy student and life can become very
hectic. Choosing the books was the next step in creating my challenge, and I
scoured, blogs, GoodReads and Amazon for great books that I haven’t read yet.
Some great friends on Facebook also sent me some recommendations to help out. I
was trying to generate a list of books from across multiple genres and with
some of my favourite authors. While devising this master reading list I decided
that my challenge needed to have a few guidelines:
- No re-reads
In
2014, nine of the thirty-five books were re-reads; seven of which were the
Harry Potter series
- No two books from the same author
I
put this rule on in order to increase the diversity of the list
- Own physical copies of the books
I
am not sure if this rule will stick, but I love owning the books, and there are
quite a few on the list already in my library
- No young adult or children's books
In
an attempt to complete my 2014 challenge, I resorted to reading some YA books
as well as some children's series (although they are some of the best
children's stories we have). This rule can also be expanded to short stories,
novellas, manga and graphic novels.
The
first book to add to my list was easy to choose: "A Dance With
Dragons" the fifth of the Song of Ice and Fire series which needs to be
read before the sixth is released. I had no problems making the book list until
I had about 14 on it, then I got a little stuck. I looked through lots of book
lists online, asked my friends and searched through top sellers on amazon. Once
I got the ball rolling again, filling up the rest of the list was easy, the
only challenge was deciding which books made the cut.
The
final list ended up as such:
- A dance with dragons- George RR Martin (owned)
- Fahrenheit 451- Ray Bradbury (owned)
- Wicked- Gregory Maguire (owned)
- Gone Girl- Gillian Flynn (Owned)
- L'etranger- Albert Camus (Owned)
- Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his years of pilgrimage- Haruki Murakami (Owned)
- Frankenstein- Mary Shelley (Owned)
- The Drawing of the Three- Stephen King (Owned)
- The Kite Runner- Khaled Hosseini (Owned)
- The Diary of Anne Frank- Anne Frank
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?- Philip K. Dick (Owned)
- I am Malala- Malala Yousafzai
- Shogun- James Claveli (Borrowed)
- Neuromancer- William Gibson (owned)
- NW- Zadie Smith (owned)
- Player Piano- Kurt Vonnegut (owned)
- Invisible monsters- Chuck palahniuk (owned)
- The Queen of the Damned- Anne Rice (Owned)
- Guns, Germs, and Steel- Jared Diamond (owned)
- Catch 22- Joseph Heller
- A Prayer for Owen Meany- John Irving
- Cloud Atlas- David Mitchell (Owned)
- Alias Grace- Margaret Atwood
- American Gods- Neil Gaiman
- The China Studay- T. Colin Campbell & Thomas M. Campbell (Owned)
I
already owned 18/25 of the books I had chosen, so I didn't have too many to
find. I tried out one of the local book stores but
they either didn't have them in stock or they were overpriced, so I turned to
Amazon. Since I was away visiting family for Christmas when January first
rolled around, I began with one of the books I got for Christmas, "Gone
Girl" which seemed like an appropriate choice given the buzz about the
recently released film based on the book.
I
think the way I am going to tackle this list is by reading a certain amount of
pages each day. The page total of the list is 11, 043, so I will have to read
about 30 pages each day to complete the challenge by December 31st 2015.
All
in all I am very excited about this new and improved reading challenge for the
year, and I am going to embark on a new journey of reading books and writing
about them.
