The 1% Well-Read Challenge

Today I set myself the task of updating my Reading Challenge Portal page and signing up for one of the last two challenges I'd been planning to join.

I'm not apparently doing well on most of the challenges that run January through December though I could pull within reach if I were to select from now on only short books or books (mostly NF) that I've started since January 1st and have under 200 pages left in them.

But that would seriously mess with the fun I've been having this month with the fiction binge and not planning too far ahead as to which story to pick up next.

The 1% Well-Read Challenge is based on the list of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. Since the list has been altered several times since it was first published, there are now over 1200 titles between the several lists. The challenge allows you to choose from any title on any of the lists to fulfill a 1% quota by reading 13 books between April 1, 2010 and April 30 2011.

You can see the list here. I was thinking of posting the whole list and bolding the titles I've already read but that was a monumental task when I did it in my note ap and the formatting won't transfer to the Blogger platform so I'd have to go through the list again to present it here. Plus I'm not sure it would be cool to have a list of 1200+ titles crawling down my front page for the next month. If my count and my memory is right I've read just over 200 of the books on the list and at one time at least started at least twice that many more. Which gives me a nearly 50% significant encounter rate for the entire list. But I was surprised by how many of the titles and authors I'd never heard of and how many of the authors who made the list multiple times that I'd never read yet.

Anyway I'm not going to pin myself down to any specific 13 titles for the coming months either. I may update this post as I finish the books I select but probably I will keep the up-to-date list only on the Reading Challenge Portal page and update this one at the time I complete the 13th or the end of next April, whichever comes first.