Weekly Geeks #9 – Challenges

This weeks Weekly Geeks is all about Challenges.

If you participate in any challenges, get organized! Update your lists, post about any you haven’t mentioned, add links of reviews to your lists if you do that, go to the challenge blog if there is one and post there, etc.

Towards the end of the week, write a wrap-up post about getting your challenges organized OR if you’re joining your first challenge, post about that any time during the week. Once you have your post up, come back and sign Mr Linky with the link to the specific post, not just to your blog.

I’m currently involved in about five different challenges and while I haven’t finished all of them, I’m doing pretty well. Here are my five challenges:

1. Herding Cats – For this challenge, we had to create a list of our 10 favorite books and then pick 3 books from other people’s recommendation and read them. We have until November 30th and I have only read one of my three novels. Here are the books I’m reading: Twilight by S. Meyer, Eragon by C. Paolini, and the Lightening Thief by R. Riordan.
2. 50 New Authors – This is a challenge that I twisted a little. The true purpose of this challenge is to read 50 books in 2008, but since it was really easy for me (I’ve already read 72 books this year), I made it a little difficult by making it 50 new authors. There are a couple others in the challenge who have added the extra difficulty and I think we’re doing pretty good. I’m currently halfway through this challenge – I’ve read 25 out of 50 so far – and I have a pretty good list of more authors to try. This also doesn’t include the countless authors that keep getting recommended, so I probably have enough to do this challenge next year as well.
3. 1st in a Series – This challenge actually works really well with one of my other challenges. This one allows me to read the first novel in 12 different series. I’ve already checked out the first book in two different series on my list (Twilight & Katie Chandler) and I’ve already finished the entire series. I have 10 more to go, but I’m confident I can do it.
4. Numbers Challenge – For this one, I had to read five different books that had a number somewhere in them. This challenge ends August 1st, but I’ve already finished it. If you want to see what books I did, check out my wrap-up post.
5. AZ Challenge – I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get through all of these novels, but I should be able to. The idea is to read a book for each letter of the alphabet, using both the title and author, for a total of 52 books. Thankfully, there wasn’t any restrictions on the novels not being a part of another challenge, so I was able to use a lot of the books from the other four challenges for this one. I’ve already done 21 of the 52 books, so I’m getting through this list.

Those are my five challenges that I’m willing to try this year. I don’t want to join too many of them and get to a point where I won’t be able to complete them, so I’m happy with my list. I get to try new authors, some books I normally wouldn’t, and read. My biggest addiction is reading and books, so this feeds it really well.

If you’re interested in finding a challenge yourself, check out A Novel Challenge. It’s a list of various different challenges that are going on and you might find something you’re interested in. If you want to see my entire list of books for all of my challenges, here’s my list. I have some of them posted on the sidebar, but the AZ challenge was a little long so that one isn’t included over there.