Summer Reading Challenge - 2014

[Holly, That Geeky One]

This is a challenge for anyone who wants to get a set number, or list of books read this summer!

You can pick your own start and end dates, just go with the general consensus of the summer months, or just go with the flow!

[Holly, That Geeky One]

Okay, so I've gone a bit overboard on my planning, but I really want to make the most out of this summer! Which means getting a variety of reading done, mostly by the key authors.

Start Date: 19th June (End of exams, woohoo)
End Date: Late September

Read: 2/35

1 Austen: Emma
1 Bronte: Wuthering Heights
1 Dickens: Great Expectations
1 Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground
1 Gaskell: Cranford
1 Hardy: Tess of the d'Urbervilles
1 Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls
3 Shakespeares: Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter's Tale
1 Tolstoy: War and Peace

9 Books I Own and I've Been Meaning To Read for Ages:
Dracula
Gulliver's Travels
The Odyssey
The Kite Runner
The Pilgrim's Progress
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
The Phantom of the Opera
Master and Commander - Read 11/06/14
A Storm of Swords: Steel and Snow

1 Book I Never Finished:
Les Misérables

3 Plays/Poem Collections:
Medea
Selected Poems of Byron
Selected Poems of Sylvia Plath

1 Short Story Collection:
The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales

2 LGBT Books
And the Band Played on
Maurice

2 Group Reads:

6 Genre Challenge Reads:
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night -Time - Read 12/06/14
A Week in December (June - Contemporary)
The Giver (July - Dystopian/Utopian)
The Silence of the Lambs (August - Crime/Mystery)
Murder at the Vicarage (August - Crime/Mystery)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (August - Crime/Mystery)

[Karen]

Wow, that's quite a list! Some great choices in there too. I'm going to have sit and come up with a list of my own

[Holly, That Geeky One]

I'm tempted to scale it down a bit! It seems very daunting, especially with some of the massive books in there!

[Renee, Mistress of the Mini-Challenge]

It's a Wish List. Go For It!

[Overbooked ✎]

Holly, congrats, there are great books in your list. I especially like the classics ones and I'm very tempted to steal some of your choices for my challenges :)

[Holly, That Geeky One]

Go for it, Kiwi!

[Cillian]

(I originally posted this in the TBR pile thread when I meant to put it here, haha!)

Thanks to the last month of pregnancy and maternity leave, I've had a lot of book reading time on my hands! I've already read 11 books since April - thanks sleepless nights!!

These are the books I'm borrowing from the library right now. I'm aiming finishing these before end of August, but things might be different when I get back to work in 4 weeks. :)

1. Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (I'm in the home stretch with this one; I hope to finish it by Saturday)
2. Amped
3. Robogenesis
4. The Clone Wars
5. Annihilation
6. Neverwhere
7. The Sh!t No One Tells You: A Guide to Surviving Your Baby's First Year (happened across it at the library and I couldn't pass it up haha)
8. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
9. The Half-Made World
10. The Rise of Ransom City
11. A Brief History of Time
12. The Pillars of the Earth (This 900+ page monster is at the end of my list, but if nothing else, I intend on finishing it before October :O)

[A]

This is the list of books I'll be completing in these few months though I still haven't decided a clear-cut timetable.

Standalone

The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight
The Truth About Forever
Bittersweet
Speak

Part of a Series

The Opportunist
Scarlet
Cress
The Evolution of Mara Dyer
If I Stay
Where She Went
Pushing the Limits
Dare You To
Crash into You
Take Me On

[Holly, That Geeky One]

There are some great lists there!

[Bookowl14]

I'm planning on reading:
The hunger games
Catching fire
MockingJay
The ruby in the smoke
(and if I finish all these)
Sister

[Renee, Mistress of the Mini-Challenge]

Holly-
What did you think of Master and Commander? Will you continue with the series?

[Renee, Mistress of the Mini-Challenge]

SUMMER READING
Start date: June 1st. End date: September 20th
Completed 48/58. Mysteries completed= 22

2 Plays:
-Sweeney Todd and the String of Pearl**
-The Maltese Falcon (mystery)**

NONFICTION:
-The Glass Castle (finish)
-Twelve Years a Slave**
-Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee
-Charles Dickens: A Critical Study**
-An Invisible Thread: The True Story of an 11-Year-Old Panhandler, a Busy Sales Executive, and an Unlikely Meeting with Destiny**

YA:
-Speak (contemporary)**
-The Perks of Being a Wallflower (contemporary)**
-Divergent (dystopian)**
-Insurgent (dystopian)**
-Allegiant (dystopian)
-Z. Rex (scifi/mystery)**
-Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore (scifi/mystery)**
-The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (mystery)**
-The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag (mystery)**
-The Name of the Star (fantasy/mystery)**
-The Madness Underneath (fantasy/mystery)
-Fangirl (2013)**

LGBT:
-Middlesex**
-The Scientific Method, The Complete Miniseries**
-And The Band Played On (Nonfiction)

GENRE CHALLENGE:

JUNE: Contemporary:
-The Husband's Secret**
-Beautiful Day**
-Housekeeping**
-The Lemon Orchard**
-Attachments**
-Girl in Translation**


JULY: Utopian/Dystopian
-1Q84 by Haruki Murakami**
-The Girl with All the Gifts**

AUGUST: Mystery
-Bleak House (Dickens)**
-Dragon Bones (Lisa See)**
-Whose Body? (Sayers)**
-Thrones, Dominations (Sayers, Walsh)**
-Call for the Dead (LeCarré)**
-A Murder of Quality (LeCarré)**
-FaceOff (anthology)**


American Mysteries:
-The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy
-Get Shorty by Elmore
-V is for Vengeance(Grafton)**
-1st to Die (Patterson)**
-2nd Chance (Patterson)**
-3rd Degree (Patterson)**
-The Blessing Way (Hillerman)**
-Dance Hall of the Dead (Hillerman)**

CLASSICS:
Chunksters:
- Don Quixote (finish in September)
- Outlander (finish in August)
- Dune**
- Dune Messiah**
- Children of Dune

-Villette by Charlotte Brontë**
-The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells**

2 by George Eliot:
- Middlemarch**
- The Lifted Veil**

4 by Anthony Trollope:
- Can You Forgive Her?**
- Phineas Finn**
- The Eustace Diamonds (mystery)**
- Phineas Redux (mystery)**

SEE STARS AND STRIPES FOR AMERICAN CLASSICS

[Renee, Mistress of the Mini-Challenge]

STARS & STRIPES SUMMER...
Completed 14/22

THE NORTHEAST:
-Blithedale Romance by Hawthorne
-The Abbot's Ghost, or Maurice Treherne's Temptation A Christmas Story by Louisa May Alcott**

3 by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
-Moving the Mountain**
-Herland
-The Yellow Wallpaper**

3 by Henry James:
-The Turn of the Screw**
-Daisy Miller**
-The Portrait of a Lady

3 by Edith Wharton
-Xingu**
-Summer
-Bunner Sisters

THE SOUTH:
-The Awakening by Kate Chopin**
-Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe**
-To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee (reread)
-Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison**

THE MIDWEST:
-Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
-The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Frank Baum (reread)**

3 by Willa Cather
-O Pioneers!**
-The Song of the Lark**
-My Ántonia**

OUT WEST:
-Roughing It by Mark Twain

2 by John Steinbeck
-The Red Pony
-The Pearl

1 Play:
-Twelve Angry Men**

Start date: June 1st. End date: September 20th
** = completed. :)

[Francine]

Wow, I don't know how I missed this thread! I am getting ready to go on vacation and, being the book nerd that I am, the books that I'm going to bring are almost as important as everything else (clothes, toiletries, etc). I'm hoping to read a lot this summer, when I'm gone as well as when I come home.

1. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte - I adore the 2006 BBC adaptation with Toby Stephens and Ruth Wilson and it's about time that I read the book!
2. Proxy by Alex London
3. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
4. Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan
5. Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas
6. The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey
7. Dash & Lily's Book of Dares by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan
8. The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin
9. Say Goodbye to Survival Mode by Crystal Paine

Well, that's as far as I'm going to go. I'm sure that I'll read more, but if I make the list too long I know that I'll panic and just give up. In certain instances, I find it best to aim a bit low and then I'll be pleasantly surprised when I'm an overachiever. :)

[Renee, Mistress of the Mini-Challenge]

I'm kind I'd on a mystery kick now that it's August. Dystopia was disappointing. And I've glutted on classics. So maybe, I just need something lighter for a while. As light as murder and mayhem. :)
I thought about starting a separate list but I really don't want to keep track of another so I'm just going to add them to my Summer Challenge list, and then tally them at the end. Lots of audio offerings at my library, so I'm wondering how many I can manage by the end of the summer. My tentative goal is 31, but I'd be happy with 15, if it gets me back into the swing of American novelists.
8/31/14 Finished 19 Mysteries!

[Renee, Mistress of the Mini-Challenge]

Bah! I'm trying to squeeze a few more titles in before Summer's official end, and not getting very far. September has been a bust in the book department.

[Amber]

There are too many to list but I've read 64 books (that I kept track of) since this the date this thread started. I devour books and apparently have no life! LOL!

[Renee, Mistress of the Mini-Challenge]

That's a great number, though, Amber!

[Amber]

Renee wrote: "That's a great number, though, Amber!"

Thanks! I just love books!!!!!

[Renee, Mistress of the Mini-Challenge]

It really does. But so does my listening time during my commute. There's so much in my mind that I have trouble focusing on the story and just have to rewind. Thank goodness I was a 'book glutton' this summer. I'm living off my 'bookfat' now. :0

[Melissa]

Hahahaha! If anything today has been highly amusing! :)