In the Year of Our Birth: A Reading Challenge for 2012

[kamreadsandrecs]

In light of the approaching New Year, I've decided to attempt - and propose - a reading challenge to everyone who reads this blog. It's something I've been thinking about for a while now, and I've decided to take on the challenge, as well as open it up to everyone who is willing to take it on. Here are the guidelines of the challenge:

a. Pick ten books that were published in the year of your birth. They may belong to any genre; the only qualifier is that they were first published in the year of your birth. If the book has been translated, you may choose to make your choice based on the year of the book's publication in its original language, or the year of its first publication in translation. If the text was expanded from another, shorter text, then you may choose to make the choice based on the publication date of the source text, or the publication date of the longer text.

b. Finish the list within the year.

There is obviously no prize or any such thing for accomplishing this, except perhaps the satisfaction of having finished the list, and of course the opportunity for discovery of new writers one many not have read before, or reading new texts from writers one already knows. I'm doing this mostly for my own personal enjoyment as a personal challenge, and I thought it would be fun to share it with everyone else so they may try it for themselves.

At any rate, here are my ten selections for the challenge, to be read in no particular order:

a. Song of Kali - Dan Simmons
b. Here Be Dragons - Sharon Kay Penman
c. Perfume - Patrick Suskind
d. The Damnation Game - Clive Barker
e. Neverness - David Zindell
f. Angel with the Sword - C.J. Cherryh
g. Emergence - David Palmer
h. Blood Music - Greg Bear
i. Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
j. Akhenaten, Dweller in Truth - Naguib Mahfouz

Feel free to share yours in the comments or on your journal, or not at all, if you choose. Just have fun with it, if you do choose to take it up. You never know what gems you might find that were published in the year you were born.

Comments

[bluebeard.livejournal.com]

ughhh I wanna do this but I wouldn't even know how to start looking for 1988 books that might actually be relevant to my interests (I purposefully avoid reading shit that I kinda know/foretell I won't like), esp. when I have already a to-read list since I bought a lot of books this year. :c Plus I'm so horrible at setting goals for myself and actually accomplishing them. *le sigh* But we'll see, I may do it anyway. :D

[le-chatnoir.livejournal.com]

I used Wikipedia to find these, actually. I typed "novels published in 1985" in the search field, and brought up a list :). To be fair, I had to sift through the descriptions to figure out which ones I might like, and the search precluded any nonfiction choices I might have wanted to read, but I thought this was a good start. And, hell, any chance to read Marquez and Mahfouz is good, too ;D.

If you don't mind e-books, I can try to find any books you might like and email them to you? It's really how I get a lot of reading done without totally breaking the bank :).

[alluriel.livejournal.com]

>.< Haha! dang... can I copy yours! Haha... have to start looking but... after my paper is done :D

[le-chatnoir.livejournal.com]

You can copy mine, but there's some horror mixed in there, and I don't know if you'd like them much ^^;. And yeah, definitely finish your paper before you start looking ;D.

BTW, are you back in the Philippines yet?