This was a new challenge to me this year, which I decided to do on impulse at the very end of 2019. Originally I intended to stick strictly to the one-book-a-week schedule, but once I realized that I had to read The Picture of Dorian Gray during one calendar week for ATY, but much later in the year (for Banned Books Week) for PopSugar, it stopped mattering and I read some books early. At the start of each month, I put any books for those weeks I hadn’t gotten to yet on my monthly TBR, but no longer worried about reading them during the correct week.
So, what did I read?
- Sunshine, by Robin McKinley
- Full Dark, No Stars, by Stephen King
- Golden Fool, by Robin Hobb
- Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel
- Red Rising, by Pierce Brown
- From a Buick 8, by Stephen King
- Beauty is a Wound, by Eka Kurniawan
- The Miniaturist, by Jessie Burton
- The Only Harmless Great Thing, by Brooke Bolander
- Dreams Underfoot, by Charles de Lint
- The Inexplicable Logic of My Life, by Benjamin Alire Saenz
- Bayou Moon, by Ilona Andrews
- Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States, by Bill Bryson
- State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett
- The Night Watch, by Sergei Lukyanenko
- The Bridges of Madison County, by Robert James Waller
- The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky
- Wasted Words, by Staci Hart
- The Dragon Keeper, by Robin Hobb
- Starlight on Willow Lake, by Susan Wiggs
- Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie
- Room, by Emma Donoghue
- The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde
- Love on My Mind, by Tracey Livesay
- The Art of Peeling an Orange, by Victoria Avilan
- The Bride Test, by Helen Hoang
- The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro
- Fake Out, by Eden Finley
- Wildwood Dancing, by Juliet Marillier
- An American Marriage, by Tayari Jones
- Rosewater: A Family’s Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival, by Maziar Bahari
- Norwegian Wood, by Haruki Murakami
- In Other Lands, by Sarah Rees Brennan
- Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts
- The Great Passage, by Shion Miura
- Dirty, by Kylie Scott
- Insomnia, by Stephen King
- Sleeping Beauty and the Demon, by Marina Myles
- Autiobiography of a Corpse, by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
- Needful Things: The Last Castle Rock Story, by Stephen King
- Behold, Here’s Poison, by Georgette Heyer
- The Other Boleyn Girl, by Philippa Gregory
- Dread Nation, by Justina Ireland
- The Hangman’s Daughter, by Oliver Potzsch
- Nemesis Games, by James S.A. Corey
- And the Mountains Echoed, by Khaled Hosseini
- War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
- This Town Sleeps, by Dennis E. Staples
- The thing About December, by Donal Ryan
- His Bride for the Taking, by Tessa Dare
- The Neverending Story, by Michael Ende
- Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell
Would I do this challenge again? Probably. A large part of the reason I liked it when I found it was that I keep wanting to go back to the Book Riot Read Harder Challenge, which I did back in 2016, but the prompts every year have become increasingly narrow and specific, to the point where it seems like only one or two books would even qualify. Which is not a good match for me reading down the huge piles of books I had sitting around at the start of this year!
Will I do it again next year? Probably not. I still have a month and a half to change my mind, but so far, my plan is to do Mount TBR only, while prioritizing my 2018 backlog (assuming I’ve finished my 2017 by then, but I’m making good progress.) Also continuing to polish off series I still have hanging. But even with those constraints, I intend to put a lot less pressure on myself in terms of reading next year, because I’ve been going hard for five straight years now.
