Reading List: Book Riot’s 2015 Read Harder Challenge

~ EMM

About half-way through this year, I decided I would participate in Book Riot’s 2015 Read Harder Challenge. You may remember, this is a list of 24 reading tasks, meant to be completed in 2015, each intended to broaden your reading horizons.

Results: 21 down and 3 to go… (see also: my Goodreads shelf)

Completed tasks:

  1. A book published by an indie press — Sword
  2. A book by or about someone that identifies as LGBTQ — Afterworlds
  3. A book by a person whose gender is different from your own — The Bone Clocks (plus a lot more…)
  4. A book that takes place in Asia — Fire Horse Girl (plus a few more…)
  5. A book by an author from Africa — Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah
  6. A book that is by or about someone from an indigenous culture (Native Americans, Aboriginals, etc.) — The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian
  7. A YA novel — The Raven Boys (plus a lot more…)
  8. A sci-fi novel — Fortune’s Pawn (plus a lot more…)
  9. A romance novel — The Duchess War
  10. A book that is a retelling of a classic story (fairytale, Shakespearian play, classic novel, etc.) — A Court of Thorns and Roses
  11. A book that someone else has recommended to you — Handmaid’s Tale
  12. A book published this year — Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on Their Decision Not To Have Kids (plus a few more…)
  13. An audiobook — The Rosie Effect
  14. A graphic novel, a graphic memoir or a collection of comics of any kind — Ms. Marvel vol 1 (plus a lot more…)
  15. A book that you would consider a guilty pleasure (Read, and then realize that good entertainment is nothing to feel guilty over) — re-read Suddenly Royal
  16. A microhistory — Astoria
  17. A National Book Award, Man Booker Prize or Pulitzer Prize winner from the last decade <– All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
  18. A book written by someone when they were over the age of 65 <– Emma: A Modern Retelling by Alexander McCall Smith
  19. A self-improvement book (can be traditionally or non-traditionally considered “self-improvement”) <– You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) by Felicia Day
  20. A book that was originally published in another language <– My Brilliant Friend by by Elena Ferrante
  21. A book written by someone when they were under the age of 25 <– Snow Like Ashes by Sara Raasch

Unfinished tasks:

  1. A collection of poetry <–I’d planned to read The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems. I bought it. I read the first few poems. Then never finished reading it.
  2. A collection of short stories (either by one person or an anthology by many people) <– I was thinking I’d either read Magic for Beginners (which I got in an Indiespensible shipment this year) or I would finish Hieroglyph (which I started reading with my hubby, but stalled out somewhere in the middle and never finished.) I ended up reading neither.
  3. A book published before 1850 <– I’d planned to read The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas as a “buddy read.” We started it. Neither of us got very far. Then we decided to bail on it. I think I’ll try again at some point, but I don’t know when.

I may still finish these last three tasks in 2016. But I’m not committing to anything because I already decided that I wasn’t going to do any reading projects or challenges in 2016. So, we’ll see what happens.

Published by EMM