Reading Goal 2015 - My Dirty Dozen

In early 2004 I started a spreadsheet to track what I was reading for a librarians read challenge. I kept going past the end of the challenge and past the end of the year. I kept that spreadsheet going until 2014 when pregnancy brain and baby brain caused it to fall apart.

I've had middling success with goodreads. I go on a tear for a few months and then abandon it again for the next 6 months. I'm going back to my spreadsheet again. If you ignore the last year, it worked for me for a decade and I know I can commit to it.

However I want to try a new reading challenge. There are lots of them floating around. Cannonball read (a book a week, 52 books), or two a month (24 total), or this one by category/feature is really cool. (ie a book more than 500 pages, a book by a female author). I also saw one group of people dedicating to reading books only by women and/or people of color this year. There are a lot of ways to do a reading challenge. I encourage you to choose one.

My reading challenge is to conquer my personal dirty dozen. In library school, my children's librarianship professor defined your "dirty dozen" as the classic children's books you are a little bit ashamed to admit you have never read. It is probably more or less than a dozen (probably more), but it is a good term.

This year I will read one classic children's book I've never read before a month.

Fair warning: many of them will probably be as audio books, that is how 80% of my reading gets done since the baby. (And before the baby it was still probably half of my reading. I love audio books.)

I'm also defining what is a classic. It may be a newer book that is an award winner. It may be 70 years old.

Some adult books may sneak in there, particularly adult books with teen/advanced child appeal. Today I helped a teen find To Kill A Mockingbird which she had expected to find in the teen section. She was a little bemused to be going to the adult section. I read that as a teen and adored it. In fact I was so excited about her starting that journey, getting to experience it for the first time that I almost hugged her. But I didn't because that is creepy. I just tweeted about it instead.

This morning I started Trumpet of the Swan by E.B. White. So far it is okay, sweet, a bit didactic, but good. I'll try to blog about the books as I read them, but no promise.