Canadian Reading Challenge

July 1, 2013 – July 31, 2013

Here’s the challenge in a nutshell (there are more detailed guidelines below): Between July 1st and July 31st, read as many books as you can either by Canadian authors, or set in Canada. Post reviews on your blog (or, if you don’t have a blog, GoodReads, Amazon, Chapters/Indigo, Barnes & Noble, etc., will do), then post the link in the Linky that will be posted on all three hosts’ blogs on July 1st.

PURPOSE OF THIS CHALLENGE:
To bring attention to Canadian authors and show the love! I’m sure a lot of people will be surprised that some of their favorite authors are Canadian, or that authors they’ve heard of but haven’t read yet are Canadian.

CHALLENGE GUIDELINES:

• Please follow all three of your hosts in some way (GFC, BlogLovin’, Networked Blogs, email, whatever is available and whatever your preference is)
• To complete the challenge and be eligible for the prizes, you must read and review at least one book either by a Canadian author or set in Canada. Each book read and reviewed counts as an entry in the giveaway, so the more books you review, the more chances you have to win. You can find a list of Canadian authors here (if you know of any others, feel free to leave a comment and they’ll be added to the list – this list was made last year for the challenge and hasn’t been updated since).
• A Linky will be posted on July 1st for you to add your reviews to. Reviews must be posted for the first time between July 1st and July 31st to count toward the challenge.
• You can sign up anytime, as long as you follow the rest of the guidelines. Sign-ups will remain open until July 30th so that people who see this in July and want to participate won’t be left out.
• This challenge is open to everyone. You don’t have to blog to participate, as long as you can post your reviews somewhere (GoodReads, Amazon, etc.). Also, you do not have to be Canadian – our co-host Patricia is American, which I think is pretty cool!
• Audiobooks, ebooks, and novellas do count for this challenge.

This reading challenge is hosted by Workaday Reads. For more information and to sign-up, please see this post.

Library Books Read-A-Thon

June 22, 2013 – June 28, 2013

I'm very excited to announce my very first read-a-thon. I love read-a-thons and I really think they motivate me to read. I present to you the Library Books Read-A-Thon. June read-a-thons seem to be in short supply so I hoped to fill in the gap.

The goal of this read-a-thon is to read as many library books as possible. If you are like me you always have books that are close to due that need to be done and fast so this read-a-thon is a great time to get those books done and get them back to the library.
I'm not going to be picky. If you want to read your own books go ahead. I just love read-a-thons so I would love anybody who could join.

This Read-A-Thon will start at midnight on June 21 and will go until midnight of the 28th. I will put an update, linky post up every day during the read-a-thon so you guys can link your progress and we can meet new bloggers through this read-a-thon. 

This reading event is hosted by Rachael Turns Pages. For more information and to sign-up, please see this post.

Rory Gilmore Bucket List Reading Challenge

Perpetual

So, the other day in this post I mentioned having come across the bucket list of books Rory read or mentioned on Gilmore Girls. I said that if there was interest, I would make it an official blog hop. Well, at least a half a dozen people on twitter mentioned an interest, so decided to make it my G post for A to Z and get this officially up and running.

For the month of April, it will just be time for everyone to get situated and scheduled and such. Starting in May, if you are signed up, you will be expected to post about at least one book on the below list every month. Then we will all hop around to each other’s blogs and read each others thoughts and have some excellent and amazing discussions. So here's the rundown:

The Rules
1. Sign up on the linky below.
2. Post a startup post similar to this one with the list.
3. Post at least once a month about a book on The List. You can post about more than one book in any given month but would like it to be at least once a month. It does not have to be a full review, but at least some thoughts you had about the book after reading the book.
4. When you post about a book, go back to your original list and link to your post.
5. Get the code for the linky and post the rules and the linky on your intro post.
6. Visit as many other blogs as you can in the hop.
7. Have a good time.

The List

• A Month Of Sundays by Julie Mars
• The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham
• Small Island by Andrea Levy
• My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult
• A Quiet Storm by Rachel Howzell Hall
• My Life in Orange by Tim Guest
• Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett
• The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
• The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby
• How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer
• The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters by Elisabeth Robinson
• Nervous System by Jan Lars Jensen
• The Meaning of Consuelo by Judith Ortiz Cofer
• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
• How the Light Gets In by M. J. Hyland
• Oracle Night by Paul Auster
• Quattrocento by James McKean
• The Opposite of Fate by Amy Tan
• Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris
• Sacred Time by Ursula Hegi
• Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
• The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom
• The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
• Old School by Tobias Wolff
• The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
• The Bielski Brothers by Peter Duff
• Brick Lane by Monica Ali
• Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi
• The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
• Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
• The Song of Names by Norman Lebrecht
• Property by Valerie Martin
• Rescuing Patty Hearst by Virginia Holman
• The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
• Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie
• The Kitchen Boy by Robert Alexander
• Just a Couple of Days by Tony Vigorito
• Bee Season by Myla Goldberg
• Fat Land : How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World by Greg Critser
• Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire
• Unless by Carol Shields
• Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy
• When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka
• Songbook by Nick Hornby
• Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
• Extravagance by Gary Krist
• Empire Falls by Richard Russo
• The Song Reader by Lisa Tucker
• Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
• A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
• Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
• Life of Pi by Yann Martel
• The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
• The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
• The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
• The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
• Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn
• Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand
• The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus
• A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
• Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
• Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
• The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
• The Lottery: And Other Stories by Shirley Jackson
• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
• Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia De Burgos by Julia De Burgos
• The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• The Picture Of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
• Night by Elie Wiesel
• The Code of the Woosters by P. G. Wodehouse
• Hamlet by William Shakespeare
• Complete Tales & Poems by Edgar Allan Poe
• Beloved by Toni Morrison
• A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
• A Separate Peace by John Knowles
• Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
• Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
• The Story of My Life by Helen Keller
• The Awakening by Kate Chopin
• Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
• Time and Again by Jack Finney
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
• Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
• Sybil by Flora Schreiber
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
• Cousin Bette by Honore De Balzac
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut
• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
• The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
• Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
• 1984 by George Orwell
• The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker
• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
• An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
• Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding
• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
• The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
• The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner
• The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
• Emma by Jane Austen
• On The Road by Jack Kerouac
• The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

The Rules
1. Sign up on the linky below.
2. Post a startup post similar to this one with the list.
3. Post at least once a month about a book on The List. You can post about more than one book in any given month but would like it to be at least once a month. It does not have to be a full review, but at least some thoughts you had about the book after reading the book.
4. When you post about a book, go back to your original list and link to your post.
5. Get the code for the linky and post the rules and the linky on your intro post.
6. Visit as many other blogs as you can in the hop.
7. Have a good time.

This reading challenge is hosted by Just Another Rabid Reader. For more information and to sign-up, please see this post.

Ready! Set! Read! Summer Challenge 2013

June 24, 2013 – August 31, 2013

Ready! Set! Read! heads to the big screen this summer! We've saved a seat for you.

This summer, we read the movies! The goal? Finish 8 titles that you've never read (10 for extra credit). The catch? Your choices should be books that were turned into movies, TV shows, or plays. You may also include books slated for film and/or theatrical adaptation.

Start date: June 24
End date:  August 31

Choose one title in each BOOKBUSTER categories:

Book(taking a)stand: A book about a political, social issue, or sociopolitical issue that interests you.

Off to see the wizard: An otherworldly book. This book is set in an alternate universe or features an otherworldly species.

Oscar-Worthy: An award-winning book or its award-winning film adaptation. *Extra credit for an award-winning book that inspired an award-winning movie. This category may include award-nominated titles too.

Keeping it real: A book that is based on a true story.

Born to be wild: A book that takes you on a wild adventure.

Under the influence of ________: A book about the power/effects of not-so-true love. You know that genuine love is not the character's motivation. What is? You fill in the blank and let us  know.

Second chances: A book you should have read but didn't. Maybe a book from a another challenge?

Teen challenged: A book featuring a child/YA protagonist. *Extra credit for a story told from the child’s narrative perspective.

Emotional roller coaster: A book that stirs your emotions. Does the plot make you sad? Happy? Afraid? Hot and steamy? Heck! All of the above? *Extra credit for this bonus category.

Reverse Shot: A book that ‘flips the script' per se. This is a movie, TV show, or play turned book. *Extra credit for this bonus category.

WAYS TO GET INVOLVED:

· Are you a blogger? Feel free to add a comment to this post with a link to your blog. We encourage you to write reviews and identify #bookbusterEdn somewhere in the subject line. We will check your blogs to keep track of the entries you earn (More on entries in the HOW TO WIN A PRIZE! section below)

· You can still participate without a blog. Leave a comment on this post saying that you’re in! Email us at readingwritersblog@gmail.com as you complete your review(s). Your review(s) can take any format. Just be your-amazing-self and let the review(s) be reflective. We will not publish your reviews on this blog without your consent.

· If you’re on Twitter, feel free to use the hashtag, #bookbusterEdn so that we can find and support each other through retweets and discussions.

HOW TO WIN THE PRIZE!

· At the end of the challenge, we will randomly choose one person to win a $20.00 Amazon gift card.

· Each finished book + accompanying book review guarantees one (1) entry. However, there are ways to increase your odds.  Each accompanying movie review earns two (2) additional entries. We encourage you to watch the movie and compare it to the book. Each Extra credit book earns three (2) entries.

No restrictions on page count.
Fulfill categories in any order.
You're also welcome to fulfill the categories without reading books turned movies. Those books won't earn prize entries though.

Happy Reading!

This reading challenge is hosted by Reading Writers. For more information and to sign-up, please see this post.