2026 Reading Challenge discussion

This thread can be used to discuss whatever you would like to talk about...books, children, school, vacations! :)

Here's a question for the group: what book are you MOST excited to read this month?

I just picked up a copy of Tin House: Fantastic Women, and I just love, love, love a whole lot of the authors who contributed to it. I'm super excited to get started, but I probably won't be able to until the middle of the month.

I'm most excited to read The Dovekeepers. My Mom recommended it for me and it looks really awesome!

Melissa, I was actually supposed to read it this past week for the CCC Bingo challenge, so I will probably start it sometime this week if you want to join! :)

I am quite excited to finally start reading the Trylle trilogy:

Very excited for: and I'm curious about how will be.

Trevor, I'd be curious to see what you thought of Lullabies. It wasn't my cup of tea, but maybe I just hadn't been in the right mood for it.

Johanna, those covers are just BEAUTIFUL!

I know! I want to have them if the books are good! :)

The Yard looks very cool, Sara!

Hey all, just wanted to let you know that I'll be on vacation from this Wednesday through next Friday. My boyfriend and I are going to visit my family in Hawaii! :)

I'll be around (thanks to the iPhone app) but not as much as usual.

Have a great trip!

Thank you! I'm hoping to get in some good reading on the beach. :D

Saw this and thought of our group :)

Andy Griffith passed away this morning. I'm only 27, but being from North Carolina...I grew up with The Andy Griffith Show. Mayberry was based off of Mt. Airy, North Carolina (about 2 hours from my hometown). North Carolina is in mourning today. I may just have an Andy Griffith Marathon today. :(

Hey guys! What's everyone's plans for the fourth of July ?

I live in the UK so I'm doing nothing but I've painted the US flag on my nails for tomorrow :)

Ashley, that is sad news :( Sheriff Taylor was supposed to live forever! My dad has one or two of Andy Griffith's comedy albums; I'll have to see if I can convert them to MP3 format somehow without incurring a lot of expense or frustration :)

Meghan wrote: "Hey guys! What's everyone's plans for the fourth of July ?"

Reading and staying cool are my plans. I've been reading
The Sea by John Banville and it has been a bit of a struggle. Looking forward to starting on my series challenge beginning with River of Darkness by Rennie Airth.

Kara wrote: "Saw this and thought of our group :)

"

Love this!

I'm headed to New York for the next 19 days, so I won't be doing a lot of reading. Anyone in the area come see a great production:

http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https...

For the 4th I will be having to wake up very early to learn how to do a job I will be subbing for a week after Saturday.

While all day I will be trying to stay cool (probably be trying to finish Beautiful Creatures) while setting up for a bonfire I'm throwing with a few close friends.

Amanda wrote: "For the 4th I will be having to wake up very early to learn how to do a job I will be subbing for a week after Saturday.

While all day I will be trying to stay cool (probably be trying to finish B..."

I liked this book, gave it 4 stars, it does have over 500* pages so it takes a while to read. Hope you are enjoying it.

Sharon wrote: "Beautiful Creatures (Beautiful Creatures, #1) I liked this book, gave it 4 stars, it does have over 500* pages so it takes a while to read. Hope you are enjoying it."

I just finished during the time I was trying to sleep, which just led me to having to figure out what was happening in the end. It is a nice book but it was a slower book with detail that you had to read just get the whole grasp on the ending. Also giving it a four, mainly because I haven't been able to read 500 pages in less then a week.

Meghan wrote: "Hey guys! What's everyone's plans for the fourth of July ?"

This is one of my favorite holidays.. we go to my grams house (we now have four generations) and have a pot luck dinner, swimming, fishing, drinks, and fireworks. We are super excited!! Hope everyone has a safe and wonderful day.

Kara wrote: "Saw this and thought of our group :)

"

Like it a lot!

By the way, happy fourth of July everybody!

Kara wrote: "Saw this and thought of our group :)

"

Love it and so true!!

Hello everyone,
Boos is everyones summer going?

We have been swimming and playing/working in the yard. We are currently getting ready to go on our five day camp trip!!

Sheena wrote: "Hello everyone,
Boos is everyones summer going?

We have been swimming and playing/working in the yard. We are currently getting ready to go on our five day camp trip!!"

Sounds fun and exciting, I love camping! My husband and I work full time and haven't taken any vacacation off but are def. planning to.

Helloooo from Hawaii! It's so nice to be home.

@Kara. Wow. I would sit there with a book all day..

@Nathaly, ya that Sufis. I've been blessed to work only 8 days during the months but I feel that I'm way more busy staying home with my kids.. I hope you get to go. We are kind of sad tho because we are on a fire restriction so no camp fire. :(

That looks like just the kind of place I´d love to go to. Or just Lapland where my boyfriend has been for a little over a week now. Usually we go together but since I haven´t had any vacation this summer he went with some friends instead.

Kara wrote: "Helloooo from Hawaii! It's so nice to be home.

"

Looks so beautiful there!

Ooooo, Kara, that looks wonderful! I'd love to go there, the heat might be too much for me though :)

Now, sorry to go back to back to books but I was just wondering if any of you have read all the books on the BBC's list thing. They think that the average person has only read 6 books off this list so I want to see if that's true about any of you. I know that this is really old but I've only recently come across it :)
This is the list of 100 books and you're supposed to bold the ones you've finished and italic the ones you've started (especially the series')

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - read some, but not others...
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy.
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth.
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt.
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

So that's 15 I've read and 3 I've started so far. I hope to have read many more by the time I die though.

EDIT: Oops, I think this is the American version of the list that people have changed, not the original.

I think I sense a new yearly challenge for next year with that, Lilac! haha. That's a really cool list.

I have 22 of those, and 3 books I have read partly.

I have read 42 of those and started 5 but not completed.

I've only read 9 of them haha :$

Trevor wrote: "I think I sense a new yearly challenge for next year with that, Lilac! haha. That's a really cool list."

I agree Trevor

I've read 24, but I have most of these on my to-read list. I would love to knock a few of these off my list!

I've read 10, many are on my to-read shelf, and I own a lot of them and have been planning to read them.

I've read 32, although a lot of those were required reading in high school and college, so I don't remember much about them all these years later! LOL

I have read 24 of them, started but not finished 4 and there are 22 on my to-read list. :)

I agree, that would be a great challenge for the next year.

This is fun!

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy.
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth.
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt.
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Finished 44 and, funnily enough, am in the middle of two. I think you're all right. This (or something like this) would make a great 2013 challenge. Keep an eye out for it in the coming months!

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy.
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth.
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt.
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

in italic, the ones I started but never finished

Johanna wrote: "1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

I've read 28 and am well past 50 years old. There are a number of these I will never read, but a few I'd like to.

When this Big Read list first came out I was in senior school and me and a friend tried to read as many of these as we could in the summer holidays, I think I managed a fair chunk at the time, but to date I have read 39 of these, and most of the rest are either sitting on my shelves or are on my to read list.
I do still have a copy of this list in my book journal from when I first started so it is a personal challenge I am always working towards :)

ETA: I'm referring to the british version apart from the figures, which is a bit different, that one I have read 44 titles from.

Does someone have a link to the original British list? I'm interested to see the differences between the two..

http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/top...

I think this is it, Trevor BBC Big Read Top 100

Thanks guys!