Andi and Heather from the wonderful Estella’s Revenge have come up with a challenge too good to pass up. I normally steer clear from challenges that go on for a year because I can be fickle and well I even have a hard time completing challenges that only last a few months but I liked the idea of this challenge a lot. The Year of Reading Dangerously Challenge encourages readers to explore those books they’ve always been intimidated by.

Even better, you can follow along with the list Andi & Heather have put together or you can make up your own. I’ve mixed in some of my choices with theirs. Here’s my list of books I hope to read in 2008.

January: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. On the official list
February: Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. I haven’t read too many German authors and as my husband is German I thought it’d be kind of neat to read some of the books he read when he was in school.
March: Selected Stories by Alice Munro. Margaret Atwood is on the list but I have read several of her novels (love her writing) so I wanted to explore some more writing by a Canadian author and I selected Munro. This book is a hefty one and it’s short stories which I’ve mentioned before that I don’t typically read so not sure how well I’ll do with it but I’ll try.
April: Mujer Dando la Espalda by Jeannette Clariond. On one of my recent visits to see my family in Monterrey, one of my aunts gave me this book by this Mexican poet.
May: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. The official list has another Capote novel but I chose this one because this is one of those books I’ve been meaning to read forever but somehow I always hesitate.
June: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Buglakov. I’ve read Lolita which is on the official list so I went for another Russian book and thought why not this one as Matt’s always raved about it.
July: The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier. On the official list.
August: Maus I and II by Art Spiegelman. On the official list.
September: The Secret Lives of People in Love by Simon Van Booy. On the official list.
October: The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. It’s time I finally read this book and this is probably the perfect time of the year too.
November: Classic Short Stories. I wonder what Andi & Heather have in store for us!
December: Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. On the official list.

Good luck to everyone participating in the challenge. I know I’ll need it!

We’ve had some cold, rainy days this weekend which left me wanting to do nothing else other than stay in bed and read. Granted, I ended up watching some movies too so my reading was interrupted a lot.

I did finish The Owl Service and can’t wait to see how the discussion goes. Unfortunately I didn’t like it much but I will save my ramblings on the book until then. For anyone who has read it or is still planning to, don’t forget to join in the Slaves of Golconda discussion on November 30th.

I read a couple of stories from The Museum of Dr. Moses by Joyce Carol Oates. Interesting. I can see why one reviewer said that the stories are more macabre than suspenseful. I don’t typically read short stories but I like these and will hopefully finish the book before I have to return it to the library.

Finally the other book I picked up, A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian, is a read for my foreign authors book group which meets next week. The book starts with this: “Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blond Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade…” Heh, I’m really enjoying this one and am already half way through it.

Now let me see if I can get organized and energized this week to finally write up some book reviews. I have finished at least six books in the last two weeks that I still haven’t written about. Yikes. What’s worse is that some of these are really good books I need to tell you about.