Challenge Wrap Up #1 – The 1% Well Read Challenge ’09

18Jul09

I signed up for 1morechapter’s 1% Well Read Challenge earlier on this year, making a shortlist of twenty books, and striking them out as and when done.

Of course, what with me being me, and all that, I added two books on, in the last two months, which weren’t in the original shortlist.

The challenge provided us with three options, and always one for taking the easy way out, I opted for the second:

1. Read 10 titles from the original list from March 1, 2009 through December 31, 2009
2. Read 10 titles from the new list from March 1, 2009 through December 31, 2009
3. Read 13 titles from the combined list (of almost 1300 titles) from March 1, 2009 through March 31, 2010. In other words, “What were they thinking dropping titles from Dostoevsky and Jane Austen?”

The final ten books read were:

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby (7th March 2009)
2. Philip Roth – The Plot Against America (15th March 2009)
3. Margaret Atwood – The Handmaid’s Tale (6th April 2009)
4. Anthony Burgess – A Clockwork Orange (9th April 2009)
5. George Orwell – Animal Farm (10th April 2009)
6. Alice Walker – The Color Purple (21st April 2009)
7. Patricia Duncker – Hallucinating Foucault (4th May 2009)
8. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – Half of a Yellow Sun (13th May 2009)
9. Salman Rushdie – Midnight’s Children (11th June 2009)
10. Jeffrey Eugenides – The Virgin Suicides (17th July 2009)

My two favorite books this year have been from this challenge (Clockwork Orange and Great Gatsby). However, what I found really cool about this one was that, I picked up a couple of books without even realizing they were on the 1001 Books To Read Before You Die list (The Plot Against America and The Virgin Suicides).

As I’ve finished this one quite early (I’m really struggling with my other challenges at the moment), I might try and go for the third option (thirteen ’til March 2010). Wanted to read all three, The Life and Times of Michael K, Cloud Atlas and Kafka On The Shore, before the year rolled forward, anyway.

If this is being hosted again, next year, I’m definitely signing up! Thanks so much for this challenge :)

Filed under: Challenges 2009, It's A Wrap!   |  4 Comments