Read Harder Challenge - 2015

Hello, great world!

I am an avid reader who spent 2014 denying that part of myself that comes alive from reading!  I read a few books here and there (because I'm sure I would have died otherwise), but really let the undertakings of everyday life overwhelm something that, to me, is as important to my health as eating right and exercise: reading.

Since it's important to me to prioritize reading in the coming year, I've set about partaking in the 2015 Read Harder Challenge from Book Riot, one of my favorite readers' websites.  I figured that I would share that journey with you as the year progresses as a way to keep me honest and to remind myself of how far I've come.

Below is the challenge itself, which I'll update with names of books as I read them. Subsequent posts will discuss the books that I have finished. Feel free to make suggestions that fit into these categories!  If anything, they'll fit under the "recommended" section!




Book Riot Read Harder Challenge - 2015

• Author under the age of 25:
• The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (Carson McCullers)
• Author over the age of 65:
• Little House on the Prairie (re-read) (Laura Ingalls Wilder)
• Stones for Ibarra (Harriet Doerr)
• A River Runs through It (Norman Maclean)
• A collection of short stories:
• One More Thing (BJ Novak)
• Unnatural Creatures (Stories selected by Neil Gaiman)
• Book published by an indie press:
• A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (Eimar McBride)
• Book by or about someone who identifies as LGBTQ:
• Running with Scissors (Augusten Burroughs)
• The Miseducation of Cameron Post (Emily M. Danforth)
• Author whose gender is different from my own
• I am a woman :) I'll use this category to catch any books from other categories that I have already fulfilled!
• Book that takes place in Asia:
• The Lowland (Jhumpa Lahiri)
• A Thousand Splendid Suns (Khaleid Hosseini)
• Author from Africa
• Americanah (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)
• Half a Yellow Sun (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)
• Book by or about someone from an indigenous culture:
• The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Sherman Alexie)
• A microhistory
• Banana (Dan Koeppel)
• The F Word (Jesse Shieldlower)
• A YA novel:
• Brown Girl Dreaming (Jacqueline Woodson)
• Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (Ransom Riggs)
• A sci-fi novel:
• Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood (Margaret Atwood)
• Authority (Book 2 of the Southern Reach Trilogy) (Jeff Vandermeer)
• A romance novel
• A Rogue by Any Other Name (Sarah MacLean)
• Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
• A Pulitzer prize winner from the last decade
• The Lowland  (Jhumpa Lahiri)
• A book that is a retelling of a classic story
• The Sleeper and the Spindle (Neil Gaiman)
• The Penelopiad (Margaret Atwood)
• Audiobook
• World War Z (Max Brooks)
• Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (Ransom Riggs)
• A collection of poetry
• Brown Girl Dreaming (Jacqueline Woodson)
• A book recommended by someone else
• Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
• A book originally published in another language
• The Expedition to the Baobab Tree (Wilma Stockenstrom)
• His Own Man (Edgard Telles Ribeiro)
• The Sound of Things Falling (Juan Gabriel Vasquez)
• A graphic novel
• Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi)
• A guilty pleasure book
• Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
• A book published before 1850
• Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)
• The Three Musketeers (Alexandre Dumas)
• Book published in 2014
• The Girl with All the Gifts (MR Carey)
• Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel)
• Brown Girl Dreaming (Jacqueline Woodson)
• A self-impovement book
• Getting Things Done (David Allen)
• The Power of Habit (Charles Duhigg)