Remember when I said there are better book bloggers? One of my favorites is Ready When You Are, C.B. who is hosting the Triple Dog TBR Dare.
[edit: James has a new blog at jamesreadsbooks.com because of Blogger feed issues but is still hosting the TBR Dare at the link above.]
I'm not one for reading challenges because as soon as I lock myself into a fixed list I'm not happy. There's a reason he calls it a "dare" rather that a "challenge." It's shorter than most of the year-long challenges and you've already created the list yourself. It's your To Be Read list or pile or shelf. And while you're locked into a list, it's one of your own making and you can choose how you go about it. When I started participating in this challenge a few years back, I had over a hundred titles on my TBR list. I'm always adding and deleting but this has kept me focused on it and now it's under 50 titles in as long as I can remember.
The thing about the challenge is that you can still buy books and I make exceptions for book club books, but you just don't read anything other than what you've already bought or had on your list for a while. It's a great way to clear the decks for the rest of the year and deal with some ever-present reader guilt. If you do it right, when April comes around you feel happy and proud and can't wait to tear into some new books!
Since January 1 I've only finished two book. The first was A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson ( a re-read for me and part of my book club) and Terry Pratchett's The Light Fantastic. That one is part of the Discworld series. I read his and Neil Gaiman's Good Omens a couple years back and loved it. Our book club did Guards! Guards! some time back and I loved it. Then last year there was a sale on the first few Discworld books for the Kindle and I snapped them up, This one is really a continuation of the story from the first book, The Color of Magic.
Now you may think it is weird we read book 8 in a 40 book series for the book club. But you have to imagine the Discworld series as if J.K. Rowling wrote the first seven Harry Potter novels, then wrote a handful of books about the dragon trainers in northern Europe, then a few books about the ghosts, then maybe some Ministry of Magic books and maybe a series about Neville Longbottom and called them all "the Hogwarts Novels." They'd all take place in the same universe, but they're really different characters and stories. So book 8 is the first book in a continuing series about the City Watch guards and it's hilarious. A great place to start and know if you enjoy this kind of Douglas Adams/Monty Python-type of funny and bitingly satirical fantasy. The first two books are earlier works, so not quite as tightly written and while I quite enjoyed them, I think book 8 is probably a better place to try the Discworld on and see if you like it there. I did, so I'm going to go read them all. Eventually.
