Weekly Geek #9: Challenges

This week's WG assignment was to organize your challenges OR if you aren't already participating in any to join one. This came with perfect timing for me as one of the things that caught my attention as I browsed the WG blogs for the scavenger hunt was all the challenges and I started collecting links to challenge info pages.

There are several I am very interested in joining in time. But I settled on Herding Cats for my first. It caught my attention first by its name. I love that saying. I used it a number of times in the first couple years here on Joystory while talking about my two cats Merlin and Gremlyn. Before I lost Gremlyn a year ago, getting the two of them on their leashes from the room to the backyard was an exercise in herding cats. They seldom wanted to go in the same direction at the same time. Our antics were often comical to view I'm sure. I related in last night's post about what can happen when you are trying to get just one cat to go up the porch steps and into the house. Imagine that scenario with two cats playing cat's cradle with their leashes around your ankles.

So the name caught my attention right off. Then I found out how the challenge actually works and I was hooked as thoroughly as I am by Merlin's claws when he's demanding attention.

Participants contribute a list of ten of their best loved books. They can include both fiction and non-fiction. Post the list and then submit the link of that post to bottle of shine the creator and host of the challenge. That list will be folded into the master list. Then between May 1st and Nov 30th this year read a minimum of three books off that list (or off the posted lists found at participants blogs) and post reviews for them and submit the links to those posts to bottle of shine.

So then. Here is my list:

1. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
2. The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
3. Tidewater Tales by John Barth
4. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
5. The River Why by David James Duncan
6. Three Junes by Julia Glass
7. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
8. The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav
9. The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
10. Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen R. Donaldson v.1 of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever (There are two trilogies and a third in the works set in this epic fantasy story world. I haven't started the third trilogy yet. I might wait for the third book to come out. But I think of the first two as nearly a single entity. I listed this one not because it is the best of the six but because it is the door into this magical world. I've been contemplating re-reading all six for some time now.)

All 10 of these books were more than just good stories for me. Every one of them had a huge impact on my concept of life, story and/or writing. Every one of them caused a huge shift in consciousness for me. They all would bear re-reading.

I just finished #2 last week and am still working on the review. I've linked #7 to my review of it. I have a review for #6 posted at Joyread I'll hunt the link down later or better yet re-post it here and then link it.

I've done nothing with Joyread or Joywrite since the summer of 2005 when news of my Dad's impending death turned my world topsy-turvy. Then that fall Ed's Grandmother's health went down fast and I was pleased to find myself able to help the family cope with it and keep her in her own home until the end. But meanwhile I'd lost my tentative grip on working with HTML. It was so much easier to just post to Joystory.