Summer Reading Challenge

My friend Kristen started a summer reading challenge on her blog, http://lostpiecesofmymind.blogspot.com and I decided not only to join in, but to copy and paste her entry into my blog for anyone else interested in taking the challenge.  (Blatant copyright infringement and plagiarism.)

If you'd like to accept and/or add to the challenge, just reply and it will find it's way onto her blog, too.  Hey, you may want to check out her blog, it's very entertaining.

(Also, I want my readers to see just how very famous I am because I have now shown up on TWO different blogs.  Maybe more than two blogs, I can't remember.  But I can definitely document  Kristen AND Holly!  Can you believe you know me?)

SUMMER READING CHALLENGE

'Tis the season for summer reading. The libraries always have a program for kids that turns out pretty well, but if they do anything for adults, it is lame. So here is the challenge to my friends (all one of you basically):

Read a book that fits these five categories and make up five more categories of your own. Either make your own post for me to steal your five categories off of or email the list. Together that's ten books. We know that ten books is a small fraction of the amount that we will read this summer. Make a list you plan to read now, but it can change at any time. You can start reading now, because half of my kids are done with school and already crying bored, even if summer reading at every library technically doesn't start until June 1. We are old enough we can make our own rules, so here we go

Friends Kristen & Jeri Challenge

1. Read the book that has been on your goodreads TBR shelf the longest.
2. Read a classic - Grownup or childrens book.
3. Read a book about summer. It can have summer in the title or take place in the summer.
4. Read a book with a color word in the title.
5. Read a book that won a Newbery Award or Honor Award during the years that you have been alive.
6. Read a book that you picked apart until it made you scream in High School English that you haven't read since.
7. Read a book that teaches you something you didn't know before.
8. Read an "Old Friend" that you've read a million times, but never tire of.
9. Read a "Reader's Choice Award" book.
10. Read a book that is on display at the library, i.e. recommended by a librarian.

We have to finish by the time all of our kids return to school.  On a day to be determined later (and after the first day of school), we will call each other on the phone with a lovely dessert at our elbow and talk. Maybe even about the books we read.

Kristen's List

1. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
2. Pygmalian by George Bernard Shaw
3. Mud, Sweat, and Gears by  Joe Kurmaskie
4. Clear and Present Danger by Tom Clancy
5. Our Only May Amelia by Jennifer Holm (2000)
6. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Which I picked apart in high school, but never actually read, yet still got the best grade up to that point on the essay, hence encouraging me to not read any more books for that class.)
7. At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson
8. Cold Sassy Tree by Olive Ann Burns
9. Surviving the Applewhites by Stephanie S. Tolan
10. ?

Jeri's List

1. An American Plague: The True and Terrifying Story of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793 by Jim Murphey
2. Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton
3. Beyond Summer by Lisa Wingate
4.  Love, Ruby Lavendar by Deborah Wiles
5. (Here's where I stretch it a little) The Trouble With May Amelia by Jennifer Holm - #5 isn't a newbery, but it's the sequel and I wanna read it.
6. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
7. The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements by Sam Kean (I'm re-reading it with the hopes that I understand it more the 2nd time.)
8. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
9. The Maze Runner by James Dashner
10. I don't know