Anyone who has been reading the blog for a while knows that I still review Canadian books on a routine basis. While I certainly comment on other books I have been reading, I don't typically write out full-blown reviews of them. It's fairly likely that I wouldn't have kept up with the blogging without the structure of the Canadian Challenge to provide a bit of a skeleton (and a raison d'etre) for the blog.
I haven't been quite as good this year as in year's past. My first review was actually supposed to be the last review for the 12th Challenge, but I got shut out in the last minute or two of June.
At any rate, the host of the Challenge itself has switched, and sign-up information is here. There's still plenty of time (9.5 months to read 13 books), so do check it out if interested. (There are occasional prizes for posting enough reviews as well as for fulfilling the challenge. Indeed, I won some poetry books from Brick Books during the 12th Challenge.) There do seem to be a few bugs to work out with the linking software, but I think I've more or less figured out how to handle it. I shouldn't have too much trouble getting to 13 this time around. I'll probably get through two more books in August. I'll definitely be reading more short stories by Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant.
I see that I didn't really get through too many of the books on this list, with the main exception being the two Russell Smith novels, so I'll probably start there. I'm almost certain to get to Sandra Beck and Basic Black with Pearls, but I do need to decide fairly soon if this is the year I tackle Atwood's dystopian trilogy, starting with Onyx and Crake. It might be. I'd rather read that than reread A Handmaid's Tale and the sequel, The Testaments, which is really too depressing for me at the moment, given the state of the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment