Joining The “My Own Books” Reading Challenge

I am joining Anne Bennett of the blog My Head Is Full of Books for a reading challenge: the “My Own Books” Reading Challenge, which starts this coming Friday, March 15, 2019 and runs through Wednesday, May 15, 2019. The goal, according to her sign-up blog post, is to read one to 10 books that you own by May 15. They can be ebooks, audiobooks, or print. From there, you write the titles of your 10 books on slip of paper and draw one slip at a time to create your reading order. Publish the list on your blog or on Facebook, link back to the sign-up post, sign up on the linky there. For more on the challenge, visit Anne’s original post.

Instead of 10, I am planning on reading eight books for the challenge over the approximate eight weeks (one a week) and two others: Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith by Barbara Brown Taylor, which I’m reading every Sunday during Lent, and Now and Then: The Poet’s Choice Columns, 1997-2000, by Robert Hass, that I am planning to periodically over the two months. The other eight, in the order I selected at random, are:

1. Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore by Matthew J. Sullivan
2. The Uninvited by Dorothy Macardle
3. Look to the Lady by Margery Allingham
4. Death in Disguise by Caroline Graham
5. H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
6. The Partly Cloudy Patriot by Sarah Vowell
7. Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson
8. You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me: A Memoir by Sherman Alexie When They Call You A Terrorist: A Black Lives Matters Memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors & Asha Bandela, with a foreword by Angela Davis.

The interesting thing to me about the order that I randomly chose them is that my second, third, and fourth choices are all from books recommended to me or given to me by a friend John. Or, in all three cases, maybe both. He was a neighbor of ours when we lived in the suburbs of Philadelphia more than a decade ago and he and I have continued a literary conversation every few months via phone.

My fifth, seventh, and eight choices I have had on my TBR for more than a year, and in the case of Astrophysics and Hawk, I have started them but not finished yet. My first choice is one that we have at our library, but that I bought so that I could read when I wanted. I guess that time is now.

Today’s plan is to read blog posts from many of you and Leaving Church as mentioned earlier. Later today, I will be going over to a neighbor’s to watch NASCAR. This coming Friday, which just happens to coincide with the start of the aforementioned reading challenge, I happen to be off from work, so you know what I will be doing…

You want to join in? You still got time. Go to the links above and join us.

How has your reading week been? What do you have lined up next?

Update (10:22 a.m., March 10, 2019): In the comments below, about an hour ago, Heather of the blog Froodian Slip mentioned that Alexie “is one of THOSE guys…”. My initial response was “I didn’t hear about him being one of THOSE guys, but sadly so many.” I didn’t mean it as flippantly as it sounds and then proceeded to Google Sherman Alexie and #metoo. Boom! ‘It Just Felt Very Wrong’: Sherman’s Alexie’s Accusers Go On Record Based on that article, with stories corroborated by NPR, I decided to choose When They Call You A Terrorist. It also feels right, especially in light of my just watching The Hate U Give last night. I didn’t rewrite the books on strips of papers and choose again. I just went with the order I already had.