25 Books I'm Committing to Read for the 2017 Backlist Reader Challenge

I don't participate in a whole heck of a lot of bookish challenges, but Lark at The Bookwyrm's Hoard is hosting the perfect one for me, right in line with what I was already thinking for the new year. It's the Backlist Reader Challenge and it focuses on knocking out pre-2016 releases already on our to-read lists. I read tons of new releases in 2016 and really neglected my backlist reading, which I always vow to catch up on with varying degrees of success. Hopefully Lark's challenge will keep me focused in the new year!

Below are 25 books I am determined to finally read this year. The top 15 are left over from my list of 25 must-read-in-2016 books (obviously I didn't do too well) and the 10 below the line are new additions for 2017. Many of them have been on my to-read list for ages, but a couple -- like "The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet" and "A Man Called Ove" are more recent discoveries.

I hope to re-visit this post this time next year and be able to pat myself on the back because I've read all these wonderful books. (And if that's the case I'll probably have had a stellar reading year because most of these are sure 4- and 5-star reads! Fingers crossed!)

Bout of Books Sign-Up + Days 1 & 2 Challenges

The Bout of Books read-a-thon is organized by Amanda @ On a Book Bender and Kelly @ Reading the Paranormal. It is a week long read-a-thon that begins 12:01am Monday, August 22nd and runs through Sunday, August 28th in whatever time zone you are in. Bout of Books is low-pressure. There are challenges, giveaways, and a grand prize, but all of these are completely optional. For all Bout of Books 17 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. - From the Bout of Books team

So this Bout of Books thing... I always seem to miss the ball on it, and I've been hesitant to participate since it seems to be fairly Twitter-centric, and I don't use Twitter. But I've -- a bit belatedly -- decided to finally take the plunge and sign up for this week-long read-a-thon!

Since I'm not working yet (for those of you who are new here, my husband is in the military and we recently moved to Hawaii) and I have a major backlog of library books (I had SEVEN holds come in at one time and I've got four left to get to), I thought this was the time to jump in if there ever was one! The library books are all ones that I desperately want to read, and they almost all have requests so I'll be unable to renew them. Hopefully Bout of Books will give me the motivation to read my butt off this week.

Yesterday afternoon I finished "The Invisible Library" by Genevieve Cogman, a super-fun fantasy novel that's the first in a series about alternate-world-hopping Librarians, and I'll be starting "Homegoing" by Yaa Gyasi today. My goal for Bout of Books is to get "Homegoing" and one other book completely finished, and be at least midway through a third by Sunday night. We'll see how the week goes!

One of the fun things about Bout of Books is the daily challenges. I'm already too late to link up for a prize in the Day 1 challenge, but it's a fun topic so I'll participate anyway.

Day 1: List your favorite and least-favorite book-to-movie adaptations. (Hosted by Writing My Own Fairytale.) This is a toughie! Even though they're often poorly done, I love seeing the movie versions of the books I've read!  I've learned to not watch the movie too soon after reading the book, which helps me avoid picking the film apart. I can't say definitively that these are my absolute favorites and least-favorites -- this post is pretty last-minute and I'm going off the cuff here -- but they fall squarely into the categories of really good and really disappointing.

Great Book-to-Movie Adaptations:

(The Swedish film version of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.")

Painful-to-Watch Book-to-Movie Adaptations:

Day 2: Mix 'n Match. Pick out 10-15 books from your shelf, any genre, any language, and any length. In each book, flip to a random page and pick the 1st word (articles such as "the", "and", "an", "or", etc. don't count as the 1st word). Use all these 1st words to try to create an actual sentence.

My words:
-oil-smeared (The Invisible Library)
-pivoting (Morning Star)
-maze (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child)
-breakfast (84 Charing Cross Road)
-fucked (The Girls)
-grass (Meadowland)
-read (Allegiant)
-garden (Life After Life)
-only (The Likeness)
-thought (The Language of Flowers)
-all (The Art of Racing in the Rain)
-licking (Homegoing)

This was rather difficult with the above words and my wacky sentence makes zero sense, but here goes:

Licking breakfast in the garden while reading, the grass was pivoting, only it was an oil-smeared maze! All she thought was, "I'm fucked."

"Reading Outside The Box" 2014 Reading Challenge

I'm excited to announce that I'm participating in my first ever reading challenge: the Reading Outside The Box Challenge hosted by The Cheap Reader. I'd really never heard of (or, maybe more accurately, noticed) reading challenges until recently, when everyone started signing up for 2014, and it turns out there's quite a variety hosted by dozens of different book blogs. I chose this challenge because some of the categories are outside my comfort zone (an audiobook, a translated book) and others just sound fun, like re-reading a book you loved as a child but haven't picked up since.

Here's the game board, which I'll be updating throughout the year, with some explanations below:

•Read a Chunkster: Read a book with 600+ pages.
•Reading by Ear: Listen to an audiobook .
•Accidentally Watched the Movie First: You didn’t realize the movie was based on a book until after you watched it. Ideally you haven’t read the book yet.
•Relive the Magic: Reread a book you really enjoyed as a kid but haven’t touched it since then.
•Gathering Dust: You’ve had this book for years and you still haven’t read it.
•Loved By Others: Other people really love this book but for whatever reason you haven’t read it yet.
•Lost in Translation: This book was originally written in another language.
•Second Chance: You read this book a while back and didn’t enjoy it, didn’t finish it, or were on the fence about it. Time to give it another try!