Reading Challenge Update 1

I figure I'll try and do these updates quarterly. That seems like a good interval.

For the Reading Suggestion Challenge, here's where I stand

January: A book published the year you were born

At the very end of January, I decided to jump on this challenge and picked up Shards of Honor. It's close to the beginning of Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga and was published in 1986.  I didn't quite finish it in January, the last 20 pages spilled onto February 1st. But it's close enough so I'm counting it. It also means that I've managed to commit myself to an epic series of 15 or so books. At least they're all fairly short.

February: a book recommended on a blog

I actually find a lot of the books I want to read on blogs. I follow along with Mark of markreads.com, though not as closely as I used to. At any rate, suggestions are constantly flying in his community and it's where I find maybe half of the books I want to read. This is where I first saw a recommendation for Beloved that convinced me I should read it. That was probably a year or so ago, but I finally got around to it this month.

It was also because of Mark's book club blog that I started reading NK Jemisin's Inheritance Trilogy. Although, that's not actually where I first heard about this trilogy. I first saw Jemisin's name on Patrick Rothfuss' blog, in conjunction with his annual Worldbuilders fundraiser. They had put together a pin up calendar using fantasy characters, and one of Jemisin's characters was used for the month of September. He linked to her blog, where she talked about the process of creating the image. There are some spoilers for the trilogy in the post, but it's worth checking out the image of Oree, the narrator of the second book. That picture is the biggest reason I hunted these books down and read them. How could I not? The timing worked out pretty well with Mark's schedule, and I read the first two books along with him, finally tracking down the final book, Kingdom of the Gods, in February this year.

I also first heard about Alloy of Law on Patrick Rothfuss' blog. It had been nominated for the same award as Rothfuss' The Wise Man's Fear, which I had recently finished and loved. And Rothfuss seemed to be endorsing Alloy of Law over his own book. I filed that information away, along with the fact that Sanderson had recently won a Hugo, but I didn't think much more about it. A few months later, Zach mentioned the name Sanderson, and it rang a bell. He and Sarah had read and loved the Mistborn trilogy (to which Alloy of Law was a sequel) and he was saying I should read it. It took a while, but I did get there eventually.

So I read a few books this month that I initially found on blogs. These recommendations may be months and years old, but that's just because my reading list is so long that it takes a while for new books to work their way to the top. I'll almost never pick up a book immediately after seeing the recommendation. Unless I get bombarded by recommendations from a bunch of different places all at once.

March: a book that has been made into a movie

I was a little tired of trying to sneak this challenge in under the gun, so in March I made sure to get it in during the first week. For this month I read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which inspired the movie Blade Runner. I'd been half meaning to read some Philip K Dick for a while, and this was a good excuse to shore up a hole in my cultural knowledge. Not to mention appreciating some late 80s Harrison Ford.

I've also made a lot of headway on the Monopoly Genre Challenge. As you can see, I'm way further along than I need to be at this point to complete this challenge on time. I've completed three monopolies completely - YA, Non-Fiction, and Science-Fiction. I'm almost done with two others, and I've gotten started on two more. I've actually read more than half of the books needed for the year, and at a quarter of the way through that's not a bad place to be. Of course from here on out I'll be diving into genres I have less familiarity with/interest in. So it may take me the rest of the year to find and read some of these books.