This was my second year doing Book Riot’s Read Harder Challenge, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself again. Admittedly, I feel weird about gameifying my reading the same way I obsessively track my steps, my phone usage, and my sleep, but nevertheless I did push myself to read more widely this year and read quite a few books I’ve been loudly recommending that I might not have encountered otherwise. I think the benefits of that outweigh the uneasy sense that I’m on the path to sublimating myself into one semi-sentient to-do list of a consciousness.
This represents about half of my 2018 reading and about 18,000 words of writing. And I plan to do the 2019 challenge this year, so Mom, get ready to comment!
- A book published posthumously: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
- A book of true crime: The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule
- A classic of genre fiction (i.e. mystery, sci fi/fantasy, romance): Kindred by Octavia Butler
- A comic written and drawn by the same person: My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris
- A book set in or about one of the five BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, or South Africa): The Devourers by Indra Das
- A book about nature: Rain: A Natural and Cultural History by Cynthia Barnett
- A western: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
- A comic written or drawn by a person of color: The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui
- A book of colonial or postcolonial literature: The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America by Thomas King
- A romance novel by or about a person of color: An Extraordinary Union by Alyssa Cole
- A children’s classic published before 1980: Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor
- A celebrity memoir: Leonard by William Shatner / Vacationland by John Hodgman
- An Oprah Book Club selection: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
- A book of social science: American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land by Monica Hesse
- A one-sitting book: Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones
- The first book in a new-to-you YA or middle grade series: Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin
- A sci fi novel with a female protagonist by a female author: The Stars Are Legion by Kameron Hurley
- A comic that isn’t published by Marvel, DC, or Image: Nick Cave: Mercy on Me by Reinhard Kleist
- A book of genre fiction in translation: The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin
- A book with a cover you hate: Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse – and I feel guilty about this!
- A mystery by a person of color or LGBTQ+ author: Long Black Veil by Jennifer Finney Boylan
- An essay anthology: The Fire This Time, edited by Jesmyn Ward
- A book with a female protagonist over the age of 60: An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine
- An assigned book you hated (or never finished): Ada, or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov