Reading in Reykjavík

From individual country challenges we move on to areas, continents and world reading challenges. Actually, I only found one each of the first two, Sadly, neither the Africa challenge or the South Asia challenge are running this year, but instead we have a Middle East challenge and a repeat of the Europe challenge. The 2013 Middle East reading challenge is hosted on a dedicated blog of the same title. It is a challenge to read books, to quote the host: "...which are written by Middle Eastern writers, or take place in the Greater Middle East, or are concerned with the Greater Middle East and with historical and contemporary Middle Eastern issues." The area covered is more or less what is sometimes referred to as the "Greater Middle East" and is comprised of Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Territories and all the nations within, bordering or relatively close proximity to the Arabian Peninsula ...

Next up are the geographical challenges. These include country challenges, continent/area challenges and international country-hopping challenges. I'll start with individual countries.The next post will be about area/continent challenges and international challenges. Please, if you know of more country challenges, let me know (just leave a comment). First up is the Books on France challenge , hosted on the Words and Peace blog. The challenge is to read books related to France in some way: set in France, written by a French author, written in French or featuring a French theme. Any genre is valid, there are 4 levels, reviewing is expected, and there is a giveaway drawing for the participants at the end of the year. There are 22 participants so far, and you can find out more by following the link. Then we hop over the Channel to Britain. The British Books Challenge is hosted on the Feeling Fictional blog. It is, quite simply, a challenge to read at least 12 books by Br...

I finished the year 2012 with a more-than average reading month, finishing 16 books, most of which were begun as well as ended within the month. It's no wonder, since because of the way the weekends lined up the Yule holidays were long this year – I only worked one day between December 22nd and January 2nd because traditionally, in my workplace, we get the half-workdays of Christmas Eve and New Year‘s Eve completely off, as well as one extra winter vacation day over the holidays. 12 of these books were romances and 7 were written by Nora Roberts. Romances are a good genre for me during the darkest winter months, dealing as they do with positive feelings and happy endings, things I need as ammunition in my battle with depression, which is exacerbated by seasonal affective disorder at this time of the year. The rest included true and fictional crime, historical fiction and a cookbook. The Books: Dorothy H. Becker & Nancy S. Wallace : Fabulous Fondues . Cookbook. Debbie Mac...

Here you will find two related types of challenges: those that have something to do with titles and ones were you read books from a specific list. I have also updated the list from the original posting to include challenges to finish a certain number of books. Starting with the title challenges we first have: The fabulous What's in a Name Challenge , 6th edition. It's being hosted on the Beth Fish Reads blog. To participate, you pledge to read one book in each of six categories. The categories consist of titles having a specific type of word in them: up or down (or equivalent) something you'd find in your kitchen a party or celebration in the title fire (or equivalent) an emotion in the title lost or found (or equivalent) The challenge runs throughout 2013 and you can join up at any time. The challenge can overlap other challenges, reviewing is necessary (in a blog post or comment) and you are encouraged to be creative when choosing books. Further rules and...

The end-of-year holidays are over, the novelty is beginning to wear off the gadgets we got for Christmas, and we are in the process of reading (or have already finished) the lovely books we got (at least the ones we actually wanted). Some of us will also, by now, be having doubts about our new year‘s resolutions.  To keep things exciting, why not join a reading challenge? Like last year, I have been looking for reading challenges. While I didn‘t find many I wanted to join, I found plenty that are (or might be) suitable for other readers, and to save someone (hopefully many someones) the search, I present here the second annual reading challenge round-up, part I . I deliberately didn‘t look to see if the challenges I featured last year are being repeated, because I wanted to feature some new challenges, but neither did I exclude them when they popped up in my searches. If you are running a challenge or know of a good one, do post a link in a comment to let me know and I will ...

I don't own a crystal ball and have no idea what 2013 will bring, reading- or otherwise. However, one can always speculate. In 2013 I will look into repeating the What's in a Name challenge and may enter other mini-challenges as I see fit. I will continue the TBR challenge, with the aim to read 50 TBR books from my own library. If I reach that number before the end of June, I may push it up to 75, but I will be happy with anything above 50. There are just so many other tempting books available from the libraries here that I can't commit to more.  I will also try to buy as few books as possible. I am saving up for some serious travelling and plan to try to cut down as much as possible on buying non-essential items. I do consider books to be just about as essential as water and air, but when you own as many TBR books as I do and also possess a library card giving you access to hundreds of thousands of books, buying books on speculations (as I have been doin...

Happy New Year! I read 155 books in 2012, which was about the same as in a normal reading year. I finished two reading challenges, the always entertaining What's in a Name challenge, which I may repeat this year, and a personal challenge of finishing 50 books from my own library that I had not read before. The second challenge started out as a means to reduce the TBR part of my library below 600 books. Then I got around 20 books from my grandfather when he cut down his library in preparation for moving into a serviced apartment, and inherited nearly 90 books from my grandmother. Naturally, this upset the original challenge. This influx of books caused me to give up on the original goal and I decided to concentrate on finishing a certain number of TBR books rather than reducing the library down to a particular number. The books that stood out for me in 2012 were wildly different from each other: Just Kids by Patti Smith is an honest portrait of the relationship/friends...