9 Books for 2009

Challenge: to read one book from each of nine categories: long, free, dusty, used, letter, strange, distance, alive or not, cover

The purpose of this challenge is to read the books in your TBR stacks. The challenge, I suppose, is that only two books can be from other challenge lists; and all the books read must be already on your bookshelf. I don’t really know if I have enough books left on my bookshelf after all the other challenges that I’ve signed up for, but I couldn’t resist because I was so drawn to the nine categories. Here’s the full list:

Long: War and Peace

Long books make me happy because one of the worst feelings in the world is parting with a good book. I’m not sure what I would consider long, but of my newer acquisitions, Tolstoy’s War and Peace is undoubtedly the longest, so that’s going to be my ‘long’ book.

Free: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Originally intended to read Winton’s Cloudstreet, but then a friend lent me her copy of Strange & Norrell. This probably does not count as ‘free’, as the book doesn’t actually belong to me, but you know. I didn’t pay for it, so technically it’s free, okay?

Dusty: Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy. No book has been sitting on my shelves unread for three years or more, except Great Expectations, but that’s already on my A to Z list. Tess has been on the shelves since February. I was planning on avoiding her in 2009, but I’m running out of unread books.

Used:  Going Solo

Part two of Roald Dahl’s two-part biography, Boy and Going Solo. One of my childhood favourites, but I haven’t read it in egons, so I’m not counting it as a re-read.

Letter: Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence)

Hm, select any letter in your blog name – ‘h’. Find the letter anywhere in the title of the book. Well, that’s quite easy. I think I’ll read Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence for this one, or maybe House of Mirth. I have both on my shelves.

Strange: Much Ado About Nothing

The thing is, I rarely purchase books that are ‘strange’ to me; if I want to attempt something outside my comfort zone, I’ll borrow it from the library. Maybe Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing? A friend gave me her copy as a parting gift, because she knew I loved books, but I don’t really read plays. I should read it, though. For the sake of old times.

Cover: The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm

I am so in love with the new line of Vintage Classics, and I bought six of them at the start of this year, because I loved their covers so much. Of those six, two were of a set titled Vintage Fear: a hefty volume of the Grimm brothers’ folktales, and a slim anthology of Angela Carter’s modern fairytales. The two complement each other so well I’ll be reading them together for this project.

Dead: A Fraction of the Whole, Vanity Fair

Steve Toltz, and his (debut?) novel A Fraction of the Whole was nominated for this year’s Booker Prize, and made it to the shortlist. However, I still want to read a dead person, so I’m going to just read two books for this category.

Thackeray died on Christmas Eve, 1863. The book I’ll be reading is Vanity Fair.

Distance: The White Tiger

I’m going to cheat, because I don’t own The White Tiger, but I haven’t read it yet and it’s been on my to-read list for a while.

Mumbai, India where Aravind Adiga currently lives, is 6308 miles away from Australia.