The Book Tower

It’s been a fair while since I’ve taken up a reading challenge. Perhaps this is because I am so hopeless at completing them. This was until I saw the Saturday Review Challenge at Semicolon, although I’m still not sure about my chances of finishing this…

If you don’t know about it, Semicolon’s Saturday Review of Books is an excellent weekly bloggy booky review fest. You are invited to post a link to a review you’ve written in the last week; it’s a great way to discover other blogs (as I’m lazy like this) and obviously a few new readers might come your way. It’s also interesting to find out what other people are writing about.

I noticed that The Literary Feline at Musings of a Bookish Kitty has already taken up the challenge, and is reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Interesting, because along with The Tenderness of Wolves and The Book Thief (even The Thirteenth Tale, but that seems so long ago now) I think this is turning out to be one of the most discussed novels of the year so far. Purely my opinion of course; my review of The Tenderness of Wolves has caused some fantastic debate (27 comments and counting) and my review of The Road has received some generous praise from other bloggers, for which I’m very grateful.

The purpose of the challenge is to pick six novels already reviewed on the Saturday Review of Books in the last year, and to read and review them by December 31st. There’s a full list supplied by Sherry at Semicolon to make the task of choosing an easy one. My choices:

• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (a reread)
• Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
• The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom (okay, it’s his other book that’s on the list but I’m a cheat)
• Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

So what are the chances of completing this one? Apart from the Jean Rhys, I own all of these titles and I’ve been meaning to reread Salinger for ages, and the Marquez and Austen I’ve been picking up and putting down edgily for some time. So it can’t be that hard, can it?