Our books for 2017

Wow! This is our seventh year of committing to reading books from our To Be Read (TBR) piles and talking about them on this here blog. Dang!

New Format for 2017

For the previous six years, we each selected our own list of books and worked on them independently. For the last two years, we have also chosen a few books to read together throughout the year. Since we enjoyed that so much (and kind of struggled to get through our independent lists in 2016...), we decided to read all of our books together this year. 

So this has turned into a little 2-woman virtual book group. (We do have a special guest in January to mix things up, though.)

2016 was the first year that we were not a part of a larger reading challenge. We missed that experience, so we looked around and found... the Book Riot 2017 Read Harder Challenge.

We then went through our TBR shelves and chose books that we had that would fit the 24 Read Harder (RH) categories and we compiled our joint list for 2017:

Our 2017 Books 

Our chosen books, in alphabetical order (RH categorie[s] that the book fulfills are in parentheses):

1. Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
   (book set in Central or South America/written by a Central or South American author; book published between 1900 and 1950 )
2. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
   (debut novel) 
3. Cunt: A Declaration of Independence by Inga Muscio
   (book published by a micropress) 
4. The Dream of Perpetual Motion by Dexter Palmer
   (fantasy novel)
5. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
   (book about books; book you’ve read before) 
6. for colored girls who have considered suicide, when the rainbow is enuf by Ntozake Shange
   (classic by an author of color; collection of stories by a woman)
7. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
   (book that has been banned or frequently challenged in your country)
8. The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin by Masha Gessen
   (book that is set more than 5000 miles from your location)
9. Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi
   (book by an immigrant or with a central immigration narrative)
10. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi
    (book about war)
11. The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl by Ryan North
    (superhero comic with a female lead; all-ages comic)
12. Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
    (book wherein all point-of-view characters are people of color; book in which a character of color goes on a spiritual journey)
13. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O’Neil
    (nonfiction book about technology)
14. What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding by Kristin Newman
    (travel memoir)

Note: We choose 14 books in case any of them are unbearable and we need to ditch them. In the past, we have aimed to read 12 per year. Of course, if we want a chance at "winning" the challenge, we'll be readin' all 14. Stay tuned!

There were 24 categories on the form (<-- that is the form with our books filled in) and these are the ones that we did not select books for together:

• A book about sports. (Jenny feels confident that a ToB book is going to fulfill this category.)
• A book that is set within 100 miles of your location (since we don't live less than 200 miles apart, no one book could fit this for both of us. Jenny is going to read Negroland by Margo Jefferson and Kelly is going to read The Sugar House by Jean Scheffler. We may or may not report on these here. It's our blog, so we do what we want. Heh.)
• A YA or middle grade novel by an author who identifies as LGBTQ+ (Jenny recommends Not Your Sidekick by CB Lee, which fills both this category and the next, but she's already read it.)
• An LGBTQ+ romance novel.
• A collection of poetry in translation on a theme other than love.

Reading and Discussion Schedule

As we go through the year, we'll update this for ourselves...

• January: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (w/ special guest: Darrell!)
• January/Feb: The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin by Masha Gessen 
• Post-Putin/Pre-UG Palette Cleanser: The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl by Ryan North
• Feb/March: Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead 
• March/April: Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi 
• May: What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding by Kristin Newman 
• July: Cunt: A Declaration of Independence by Inga Muscio

[time passes... book blog gets ignored...]

• Nov: Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi 
• Dec: The Dream of Perpetual Motion by Dexter Palmer

Whew! That was a lot of information. But hey, we'll be happy we wrote all of this down in another seven years when we say "Wait... how did we pick our books that year?"

Now let's get reading!