2012 Reading Challenges (part 1)

Happy 2012, everyone!

I hope you all had a good Christmas. Most of our decorations are in boxes, which are hidden behind other boxes somewhere in our storage unit. So we had a sweet, simple Christmas this year.

That's a bay tree for a Christmas tree. And note the wood stacked under the fireplace. Most of that ended up in the last upstairs room that needed flooring. (And don't worry, that's a fake log in the fireplace.)

Normally, I would now post my Fifty Books Challenge list for 2011, but I realized that I had neglected to post a list for 2010. In part because I was more worried about moving and selling the house than blogging, and in part because I wasn't sure I had actually read fifty books. But by including some of the longer, more "word heavy" graphic novels I read, I just made fifty. 2011 will have to wait until the next post. Here's 2010.

Fiction  

YA/Juvenile   
Nonfiction  
Memoir
Collections (short stories, essays, etc.)  
Drama  
Poetry

1. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress—Dai Sijie (tran. by Ina Rilke)
2. Good Masters, Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village—written by Laura Amy Schlitz, illustrated by Robert Bird
3. The Literary Enneagram: Characters from the Inside Out—Judith Searle
4. The Glass Castle: A Memoir—Jeannette Walls
5. 1984—George Orwell
6. Shriek: An Afterword—Jeff Vandermeer
7. The Patron Saint of Liars—Ann Patchett
8. Castle Rackrent—Maria Edgeworth
9. The Bible Cure for Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue—Don Colbert
10. Wide Sargasso Sea—Jean Rhys
11. Early Irish Myths and Sagas—trans. by Jeffrey Gantz
12. In Country—Bobby Ann Mason
13. The Names Upon the Harp: Irish Myth and Legend—written by Marie Heaney, illustrated by P.J. Lynch
14. The Color Purple—Alice Walker
15. Homer’s Odyssey: A Fearless Feline Tale, or How I Learned about Love and Life with a Blind Wonder Cat—Gwen Cooper
16. Murder in the Cathedral—T.S. Eliot
17. The Stranger—Albert Camus
18. The Messiah of Stockholm—Cynthia Ozick
19. Literary Feuds: A Century of Celebrated Quarrels—From Mark Twain to Tom Wolfe—Anthony Arthur
20. One Hundred Years of Solitude—Gabriel Garcia Marquez
21. The Quiet American—Graham Greene
22. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone—J.K. Rowling (audio book)
23. A Clockwork Orange—Anthony Burgess
24. Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader—Anne Fadiman
25. 99 Poems in Translation—selected by Harold Pinter, Anthony Astbury, and Geoffrey Godbert
26. Moll Flanders—Daniel Defoe
27. How Reading Changed My Life—Anna Quindlen
28. The Reader—Bernhard Schlink (trans. by Carol Brown Janeway)
29. The Complete Persepolis (graphic novel)— Marjane Satrapi
30. Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood—bell hooks
31. Longing: Stories of Racial Healing—Phyllis and Eugene Unterschuetz
32. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia—Elizabeth Gilbert
33. Watchmen (graphic novel)—written by Alan Moore, art by Dave Gibbons
34. Get Known Before the Book Deal: Use Your Personal Strengths to Grow an Author Platform—Christina Katz
35. Once Upon a Quinceanera: Coming of Age in the U.S.A.—Julia Alvarez
36. Coraline (graphic novel)—written by Neil Gaiman, art by P. Craig Russell
37. What Ever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? (graphic novel)—Brian Fies
38. Wish You Well—David Baldacci
39. Mushishi (Vol. 1)—Yuki Urushibara
40. Smile (graphic novel)—Raina Telgemeier
41. Inside the Beverly Hills Supper Club Fire—Ron Elliot (as told by Wayne Dammert)
42. Their Eyes Were Watching God—Zora Neale Hurston
43. Maus (graphic novel)—Art Spiegelman
44. Sarah’s Key—Tatiana de Rosnay
45. New Covenant Bound—T. Crunk
46. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Creating a Graphic Novel—Nat Gertler and Steve Lieber
47. Drinking Coffee Elsewhere—ZZ Packer
48. American-Born Chinese (graphic novel)—Gene Luen Yang
49. The Art of Reading Poetry—Harold Bloom
50. Watership Down—Richard Adams

Total:
22 fiction.

11 non-fiction

7 memoir (though maybe Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? should be here too)

4 juvenile/YA (or 5, since Smile is a YA memoir)

3 collections

2 poetry collections

1 play

Out of those books 6 were graphic novels. (A medium I started exploring in 2010.) And 10 were on that literature list I like.

There were other things I read that were too short/word-light to make the list. I thought a few of these were worth mentioning:

• A Day in the Life of Ireland: Photographed by 75 of the World's Leading Photojournalists on One Day, May 17, 1991—Collins Publishers

• Mouse Guard: Fall 1152—David Peterson (graphic novel)

• The Arrival—Shaun Tan (graphic novel/picture book)