Books and Movies

The rules for the 2009 TBR Challenge are pretty simple: choose 12 books (one for each month) from your to-be-read stacks. Read those 12 books during 2009. You must have your list up by January 1, 2009 (tomorrow!), and after that you cannot make any changes to your list. Books can count for other challenges. Re-reads do not count. You can create a list of 12 alternates, if you wish, and those titles can be substituted for any on your original list. For the full set of rules, click over to the TBR Challenge Blog.

Here are my twelve books:

1. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
2. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners by James Joyce
3. Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
4. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
5. Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
6. Death Comes to the Archbishop by Willa Cather
7. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
8. So Brave, Young, and Handsome by Leif Enger
9. The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor
10. Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell
11. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
12. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

As you can see, my list is very classics-heavy. I wasn’t happy with the number of classics I read in 2008. I read a lot of modern fiction and recently published historical fiction, which was wonderful, but I have all these amazing classics sitting in my to-be-read stacks.

Classics can sometimes be more daunting to read, and I tend to avoid them if I’m especially busy or stressed, because they require more concentration and a bigger time investment. Hopefully, doing this challenge will mean that by the end of 2009, I’ll have been a little more ambitious in my reading.