Take a Chance Challenge

Thank goodness I saw this. This is my first challenge of the year and it looks like a lot of fun. If you would like to join, visit Find Your Next Book Here to sign up and get started. Here are the ten ways to take a chance on a new book!

1. Random Book Selection. Go to the library. Position yourself in a section such as Fiction, Non-Fiction, Mystery, Children (whatever section you want). Then write down random directions for yourself (for example, third row, second shelf, fifth book from right). Follow your directions and see what book you find. Check that book out of the library, read it and then write about it. (If you prefer, you can do the same at a bookstore and buy the book!)

2. Random Word. Go to this random word generator and generate a random word. Find a book with this word in the title. Read the book and write about it.

3. Birth Year Book. Find a book that was published or copyrighted in the year of your birth. Read the book and write about it.

4. Judge A Book By Its Cover. Pick out a book based SOLELY on the cover. First, write about what you expect the book to be about based on the cover art. Then read the book and write about how the book was different from and/or similar to what the cover art led you to expect.

5. Phoning An Author. Pick a random last name out of the phone book. Find an author with the same last name and read a book by them. Write about it. (I'm flexible ... if the first random name you pick is Xprxyrsss, you can pick again!)

6. Public Spying. Find someone who is reading a book in public. Find out what book they are reading and then read the same book. Write about it.

7. Random Bestseller. Go to Random.org and, using the True Random Number Generator, enter the number 1950 for the min. and 2008 for the max. and then hit generate. Then go to this site and find the year that Random.org generated for you and click on it. Then find the bestseller list for the week that would contain your birthday for that year. Choose one of the bestsellers from the list that comes up, read it and write about it.

8. Lit Riff (inspired by the book Lit Riffs by Matthew Miele.) Choose a song and then write a brief story that is inspired by or further explains the lyrics of the song.

9. Poetic Review. Write a book review in three different forms of verse: haiku, limerick and free verse. (You can pick any book you want to write about.)

10. Movie/Book Comparison. Find a book that you haven't read that has a movie based on it that you haven't seen. Read the book and watch the movie within a few days of each other. Write about your reactions to both the book and the movie and compare the two.

So, I think I will get started!

75 Books Every Woman Should Read

Thanks to Jezebel for providing this list. I have read only 18 (in red), have heard of most of them, and should get busy. They also have a must read list for men.


The Lottery (and Other Stories), Shirley Jackson
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
White Teeth, Zadie Smith
The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
Excellent Women, Barbara Pym
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
Like Life, Lorrie Moore
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
The Delta of Venus, Anais Nin
A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
A Good Man Is Hard To Find (and Other Stories), Flannery O'Connor
The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx
You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, Alice Walker
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Fear of Flying, Erica Jong
Earthly Paradise, Colette
Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt
Property, Valerie Martin
Middlemarch, George Eliot
Annie John, Jamaica Kincaid
The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
Runaway, Alice Munro
The Heart is A Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
You Must Remember This, Joyce Carol Oates
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill
The Liars' Club, Mary Karr
I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, Betty Smith
And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
Bastard out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison
The Secret History, Donna Tartt
The Little Disturbances of Man, Grace Paley
The Portable Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker
The Group, Mary McCarthy
Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
The Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag
In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez
The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck
Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
Three Junes, Julia Glass
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft
Sophie's Choice, William Styron
Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann
Love in a Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford
Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin
The Red Tent, Anita Diamant
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
The Face of War, Martha Gellhorn
My Antonia, Willa Cather
Love In The Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Harsh Voice, Rebecca West
Spending, Mary Gordon
The Lover, Marguerite Duras
The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
Tell Me a Riddle, Tillie Olsen
Nightwood, Djuna Barnes
Three Lives, Gertrude Stein
Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
Possession, A.S. Byatt

2008 Update

I made a personal challenge to read 52 books in 2008 – or at least one book per week. Half the year is gone and I have read 30 books, and 8443 pages. Of these books, only six were non-fiction. A few fell into the historical fiction genre as well. Most importantly, six of the books were Advanced Reader Copies for which I am grateful. 66% of the authors were female. Many were award winners! So far it has been a great year of reading.

In the 1% Reading Challenge, I have completed only 2 of 10 books. I guess I need to get going on that list.

To make it even better, it is wonderful to share with all of the people in the Tuesday Things book ring. So many recommendations that I think I will make my goal this year. Thanks to all of the publisher's who are willing to take a chance on a librarian blogger!

29. The Things They Carried

When I look at the list of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, I often wonder why some books are included. I suppose some books are included because there is a person for every book, right? Well, in the case of The Things They Carried – it is more that there is “A” book for EVERY person. This book provides insights into the Viet Nam conflict that I have never encountered in four decades of reading. As a Baby Boomer who grew up in the shadows of the Kennedy assassination and the Viet Nam conflict, I knew these people. I knew boys who went to Viet Nam. I knew boys who did not return. I knew boys who returned, but never came home. I knew the people in Tim O’Brien’s novel. And it was sad to remember them. Still, it was beautiful to remember them through Tim O’Brien’s memories. It was hard; it was easy. This book was an experience I am grateful for having. Although I suppose it is possible that there are other opinions, I cannot imagine it.

O’Brien repeats the words the things they carried many times in the novel. It is this repetitiveness that helps us understand what the men carried and why. For example:

The things they carried:
Were largely determined by necessity
Was partly a function of rank, partly of field specialty
Varied by mission
Were determined to some extent by superstition
USO stationery and pencils and pens
Themselves with poise, a kind of dignity
All the emotional baggage of men who might die
Shameful memories
And the list continues

While telling the stories of the men who served together in Viet Nam, O’Brien tells us about the value of stories – be they real or imagined:
Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story. (p. 40)

By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain. (pp. 179-180)

Finally, O’Brien leaves the reader to think about war and the harsh consequences. He reminds us that when a man died, there had to be blame. Who gets the blame? The idiots who made the war. The rain, the river, the mortar rounds, people who were too lazy to read a newspaper, who were bored by the daily body counts, who switched channels at the mention of politics. Blame whole nations, blame God. Blame an old man in Omaha who forgot to vote. Ultimately – the causes were immediate. A moment of carelessness or bad judgment or plain stupidity carried consequences that lasted forever. (pp. 198-199 – words have been edited out by me, but the meaning is not changed).

This book made me think. Do we belong in Iraq? Are we immune to the body counts? Unless they are our own? Did we ever belong in Iraq? If we did, how do we get out? If we didn’t, how do we get out? How do we best honor those who have given their lives? What did they carry?

If I never read another book on the list of 1001, I am thankful for the list because it led me to this book. I love you Uncle Rick and I am sorry for all the things that you are still carrying.

TITLE: The Things They Carried
AUTHOR: Tim O’Brien
COPYRIGHT: 1990
PAGES: 273
TYPE: Fiction
RECOMMEND: Yes, one of the best books I have ever read.

LibrarysCat

22. Emma

Jane Austen was thirty nine years old when Emma was published. She died only a year and a half later. During her lifetime, she only earned 40 pounds for this remarkable work of literature. At the Prince Regent’s request, Austen dedicated her book to him.

Emma is a comedy of manners and romance. The title character Emma Woodhouse lives happily, and highly, with her father. She is certain that she has a gift for matchmaking until she finds her instincts at complete odds with reality. As she continues to find a mate for her friend, she maintains that she will never marry. Austen is brilliant in her descriptions of the people with whom Emma interacts. It seems that the reader knows each person, their faults and what makes them dear. Emma finds that she has misjudged and misguided a number of her friends. In the end, everyone is happy except for the reader who wishes the story would continue on and on.

TITLE: Emma
AUTHOR: Jane Austen
COPYRIGHT: 1815
PAGES: 304
TYPE: Fiction
RECOMMEND: Another wonderful classic, everyone should read

FlusiCat

1% sounds so simple

The goal of this challenge is to read 10 books in 10 months from the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list. For you non-math people, 10 out of 1001 is approximately 1%, hence the title. The challenge will run from May 1, 2008 through February 28, 2009.

To sign up visit: http://1morechapter.com/1percent/?p=1#comment-32

Here are the ten books I am selecting now - that may change!

1. Vanishing Point - David Markson

2. Everything is Illuminated - Jonathan Safran Foer

3. The Emigrants - W.G. Sebald

4. Wild Swans - Jung Chang

5. The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien

6. Sexing the Cherry - Jeanette Winterson

7. The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie

8. Cranford - Elizabeth Gaskell

9. Amelia - Henry Fielding

10. The Pilgrim's Progress - John Bunyan

Think about joining us - if I finish these ten I will be up to a whopping 7.59% of the 1001 Books You Should Read Before you Die. According to the chart, I need to read 35 of these books each year to get them done before I die - or have an exceptionally longer than average life!