Melanie's "There's No Way This Can Go Wrong" 2018 Reading Challenge

[Melanie]

This is my first year doing the Around the Year challenge, and I'm so excited! Writing out my lists at the beginning of the year (or the end, as if were), I always feel so ambitious and organized and very sure that things will go exactly as I've planned them. You'd think I'd have learned my lesson by now. In reality, I'm sure I'm going to change this list about a dozen times every month. There are just so many shiny books to read!

💕 = a book I loved
🕒 = a book I actually read in the week I was supposed to

The 2018 List

1. A book with the letters A, T & Y in the title
-The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian 🕒 💕
-Lily and the Octopus
-The Library at Mount Char🕒 💕

2. A book from the first 10 books added to your To Be Read list
-Blindness🕒

3. A book from the 2017 Goodreads Choice Awards
-Little Fires Everywhere💕

4. 4 books linked by the 4 elements: Book #1 Earth (in title, cover, content, setting, author...)
-A Wizard of Earthsea🕒
-Wicked Plants

5. A book about or inspired by real events
-The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
-Room🕒 💕

6. A book originally written in a language other than English
-Austerlitz
-All Quiet on the Western Front🕒
-The House of the Spirits
-My Brilliant Friend

7. A gothic novel
-Wuthering Heights
-Northanger Abbey🕒💕

8. An "own voices" book*
-Purple Hibiscus🕒💕
-Patience & Sarah

9. A book with a body part in the title (heart, bones, teeth, skin, blood, etc)
-The Bone Clocks
-The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
-White Teeth

10. An author's debut book (their first book to be published)
-I Capture the Castle💕
-The Joy Luck Club

11. A literary fiction
-The Poisonwood Bible
-Life After Life💕
-Invisible Cities

12. A book set in Africa or South America
-Bel Canto
-The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut's Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt

13. A book with a plot centered around a secret (forbidden love, spies, secret societies, etc)
-The Historian
-The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

14. 4 books linked by the 4 elements: Book #2 Fire
-Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness
-Fahrenheit 451

15. A book with an unique format/writing structure
-House of Leaves💕

16. A narrative nonfiction
-In Cold Blood

17. A book you expect to make you laugh
-To Say Nothing of the Dog
-Mort💕

18. A book with a location in the title
-Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
-Bastard Out of Carolina
-A High Wind in Jamaica
-Slouching Toward Bethlehem

19. A book nominated for the Edgar Award or by a Grand master author
-The Devil in the White City
-Different Seasons

20. A book rated 5 stars by at least one of your friends
-The Goblin Emperor💕
-Deerskin
-Oryx and Crake
-O Pioneers!
-Lincoln in the Bardo

21. A book written in first person perspective
-Alias Grace
-H is for Hawk💕

22. A book you have high expectations or hope for
-Wolf Hall

23. A medical or legal thriller
-The Hot Zone
-The Alienist

24. A book with a map
-The Silmarillion💕

25. A book with an antagonist/villain point of view
-Grendel💕

26. A book with a text only cover
-The Fire Next Time
-White Teeth
-The Mother of All Questions

27. A book about surviving a hardship (war, famine, major disasters, serious illness, etc)
-The Glass Castle
-Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
-The War of the Worlds

28. 4 books linked by the 4 elements: Book #3 Water
-The Color of Water🕒💕
-The Light Between Oceans
-The Snow Child
-Tales of the South Pacific

29. A book with a "Clue" weapon on the cover or title (lead pipe, revolver, rope, candlestick,
dagger, wrench)
-The Subtle Knife
-Girl Waits With Gun
-The Big Sleep

30. A short book
-The Reluctant Fundamentalist💕
-The Invisible Man
-A Room With a View

31. A book set in a country you'd like to visit but have never been to
-The Joy Luck Club
-The Summer Book💕

32. An alternate history book
-The Years of Rice and Salt
-11/22/63

33. A book connected (title, cover, content) to a word "born" in the same year as you (1993- dwarf planet -> astronomy)
-A Short History of Nearly Everything💕

34. (A book that is set during the winter or in a snowy environment)
-If On a Winter's Night a Traveler

35. A book featuring a murder
-The Name of the Rose
-Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
-Under the Banner of Heaven

36. A book published in the last 3 years (2016, 2017, 2018) by an author you haven't read
before
-Her Body and Other Parties
-Sing, Unburied, Sing
-Exit West
-Future Home of the Living God

37. A Women's Prize for Fiction winner or nominee
-Do Not Say We Have Nothing
-Half of a Yellow Sun
-The Power💕

38. A science book or a science fiction book
-Parable of the Sower
-Borne
-Doomsday Book
-The Sixth Extinction💕
-On the Beach

39. A book with a form of punctuation in the title
-Cry, the Beloved Country
-Who Cooked the Last Supper?💕

40. A book from Amazon's 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime list
-Silent Spring
-The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
-The Things They Carried

41. A book by an author with the same first and last initials
-Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
-Northern Lights
-White Noise
-The Quiet American

42. A book that takes place on, in, or underwater
-Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

43. A book with a title that is a whole sentence
-The Heart Goes Last
-We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families

44. A ghost story
-Her Fearful Symmetry
-Head Full of Ghosts
-The Woman in White

45. A book that intimidates/ scares you
-Midnight's Children
-Lonesome Dove
-The Stand

46. 4 books linked by the 4 elements: Book #4 Air
-The Wind in the Willows
-Under the Banner of Heaven
-The Cloud Atlas

47. A book where the main character (or author) is of a different ethnic origin, religion, or
sexual identity than your own
-Passing
-The Periodic Table

48. A book related to one of the 7 deadly sins (pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, sloth)
-The Grapes of Wrath
-Dune
--A Separate Peace

49. A book from one of the Goodreads Best Books of the Month lists
-Hag-Seed
-The Passage
-We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

50. A book with a warm atmosphere (centered on family, friendship, love or summer)
-The Blue Castle💕
-Major Pettigrew's Last Stand
-A Man Called Ove
-The Rules of Magic

51. An award-winning short story or short story collection
-Interpreter of Maladies💕
-What is Not Yours is Not Yours

52. A book published in 2018
-The Monster Baru Cormorant
-Circe💕
-The Silence of the Girls

[MJ]

Little Fires Everywhere, In Cold Blood, and A Wizard of Earthsea are on my list too. The last one is sitting on my bedside table, waiting.

Good luck with the challenge! I am busy making changes to THIS year's list so that I can get as many read as I can before the end of the year. I always end up changing my mind, so I didn't even try to make all my selections for 2018. Too many books!

[Brooke]

I've read quite a few on your list! Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, In Cold Blood, Room, The Glass Castle, 11/22/63, The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus, In the Woods and Life After Life were all excellent. And I have Little Fires Everywhere and Interpreter of Maladies planned for 2018. Good luck!!

[Lizzy]

We have quite a few of the same options for the prompts...it will be fun to compare.

[Tracy]

From your list I've enjoyed Wuthering Heights, Henrietta Lacks, The Poisonwood Bible, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, 11/22/63, The Hot Zone, On The Beach , The Stand ( Jody is going to disagree with me lol), We are all Completely Beside Ourselves, A Man Called Ove, and The Interpreter of Maladies.

Enjoy your challenge !!

[Joan]

I love your choices

[Jody]

Tracy! 😂

You have some great books on here - Mort is my favourite Discworld book. I hope you love it!

[Tracy]

Jody wrote: "Tracy! 😂

You have some great books on here - Mort is my favourite Discworld book. I hope you love it!"

I reallllllly want to re-read it now 😂

[Melanie]

Jody wrote: "Tracy! 😂

You have some great books on here - Mort is my favourite Discworld book. I hope you love it!"

I'm terrible at reading the Discworld books in order, but I loved Death when it/he appeared in Hogfather and Wyrd Sisters, so I'm excited to see his debut!

[Leigh]

Lots of great books on your list - and some are on mine, too! And I really like that you're indicating books you loved.

[Melanie]

I feel like I'm woefully behind at only 90 books so far this year- last year I read 143, and most of them before November 2017. But I'm only one book behind schedule for the ATY '18 challenge, and actually ahead of my year's goal of 102 books. But I would still prefer if I was over 100 by this point.