Zoe's 888

This is my initial list of books I planned to read; the books I've actually read are in message 7 (initial categories) and 31 (new and improved categories).

Re-posting from another thread (and getting rid of a duplicate listing of Brave New World):

8 Dewey Decimal Challenge Books
Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose
The Riddle of the Compass
Tulipomania
The World Without Us
Edith Hamilton's Mythology (book touchstone not working)
Aristotle's Children
The Study of Greek Inscriptions
The Abolition of Man

8 Math/Science Books
A History of Greek Mathematics, Volume 1
Lavoisier in the Year One
Innumeracy
Why Johnny Can't Add
The Sleepwalkers
Godel, Escher, Bach
The Mystery of the Aleph
The Exact Sciences in Antiquity

8 Classics Books
The Study of Greek Inscriptions (cross-list)
Mythology (cross-list)
The Greeks and the Irrational
Cleopatra
The Classical World
A History of Greek Mathematics, Volume 1 (cross-list)
Early Greek Science: Thales to Aristotle
Greek Science After Aristotle

8 Children's/YA Fiction
The Book Thief
The Looking Glass Wars
The Golden Compass
The Grand Tour
Castle in the Air
Terrier
Turnabout
In the Coils of the Snake

8 Historical Fiction
The Grand Tour (cross-list)
The Sweet Far Thing
Slammerkin
Cleopatra's Heir
Under the Jolly Roger
Fabrizio's Return
The Great Stink
Girl With a Pearl Earring

8 Already-Started Books
What's Wrong with University
King John of Canada
28: Stories of AIDS in Africa
The Classical World (cross-list)
The Fight for English
The Sleepwalkers (cross-list)
The Secret History

8 Books Owned Before July 2007

8 Books Purchased from July to December 2007

no point making a list for these last two categories; there are plenty to choose from!

This is probably a stupid question but what is a dewey decimal challenge book? Thanks.

Some of us are trying to read a book in each of the 1,000 categories of the Dewey Decimal system.

Thanks for the answer - I knew it couldn't be that they were all about the Dewey Decimal system! Is there a place that you can go to see the categories?

You can check out the group here. It has a link to the list.

Ooh, I have some tba slots in my YA category and I think I'm going to add The Book Thief.

List of the books I've actually read:

8 Dewey Decimal Challenge
The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh
Babylon, Memphis, Persepolis: Eastern Contexts of Greek Culture
The Caliph's House
The Orientalizing Revolution
Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type
Empires of the Plain
Me to We: Finding Meaning in a Material World

8 Ancient World (Fiction or Non-Fiction)
Black Ships
The Origins of Greek Thought
The Ancient Mediterranean World: From the Stone Age to AD 600
Ancient History: Monuments and Documents

8 Math/Science
Early Greek Science: Thales to Aristotle

8 Children's/YA Fiction
Turnabout
The Subtle Knife
The Thief
In the Coils of the Snake
Valiant
New Moon
Eclipse
Breaking Dawn

8 Adult Fiction
Slammerkin
Ella Minnow Pea
Year of Wonders
Woman of a Thousand Secrets
The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits
The Saddlebag
Fingersmith

8 LT Group Reads
Elantris (The Green Dragon)
The Golden Compass reread (Read YA Lit and The Green Dragon)
Life as We Knew It (Read YA Lit)
Wicked Lovely (Read YA Lit)
An Abundance of Katherines (Read YA Lit)
The Lightning Thief (Read YA Lit)

8 Already-Started (before December 2007)

8 Random
Ex Libris
Living Rich by Spending Smart
Bookstore Tourism
Graceling
The Hunger Games

TBR-reduction categories (all of these books should fit in somewhere above too):

8 Purchased July-December 2007 (and not yet read)
Slammerkin
Ex Libris
In the Coils of the Snake

8 Purchased January-June 2007 (and not yet read)
Elantris

8 Purchased Before 2007 (and not yet read)
The Subtle Knife
Early Greek Science: Thales to Aristotle
Year of Wonders
Valiant

>6 detailmuse: I've heard so many good things about The Book Thief, I'm really hoping it manages to live up to all the hype. It was also the monthly group read for the Read YA Lit group very recently, so I'm looking forward to reading that discussion when I'm done with the book.

I think I may get rid of my classics category and add in another purchase-date category. I've decided that my main goal should be to reduce my TBR piles.

I had to revise my categories after seeing that I was already straying from them: I purchased and started reading a general fiction book yesterday, so I changed the historical fiction to adult fiction in general, as opposed to children's/YA.

I can't decide when to update this.... I don't want to just repost my messages from the 50 Book Challenge group, but I don't want to ignore this thread either. Maybe I'll post here after every 5 books.

I've so far read 6 books and filled 7 slots (the list is in message 7), but they're all easy ones. I'm not going to try to change my reading, though, since I already have a lot of difficult school reading to do. I'll just see how it goes.

I'm so glad you posted an update, I wondered how your reading was going. I'd given up on keeping up with the 50 Book posts, but I've starred your thread. Like the other commenter there, I'm also going to get the book about banned alphabet letters -- great premise!

Thanks for your post, Detail_Muse! It's nice to know that someone actually reads this (though apparently I don't--I'm not sure how it took me so long to notice that there was a new message). Maybe from now on I will update both threads after every book, since you're right that the volume of 50 Book Challenge posts is pretty overwhelming.

Let me know what you think of Ella Minnow Pea :)

I read all 888 challenges.

Argh. I started writing a post and it disappeared when I tried to get an o with an umlaut on it.

The gist of it was, I changed my categories yet again. The three TBR-reduction categories are now separate and will overlap with the main categories. I added a "random" category because I just don't think it will work otherwise. And I joined another book challenge, the TBR Challenge, where you post a list of 24 books that have been sitting in your TBR pile for 6+ months and actually read half of them. I figure the ridigity of that one balances nicely with the extreme flexibility of this one.

Also, I read The Subtle Knife. I don't know why I didn't like it more; there were parts that were really good, but other parts seemed to drag. It also made me wonder about what constitutes a children's book. Yes, the characters were children and there was no bad language or sex, but it seemed more complex in plot, language, and themes, and more depressing, than I would normally expect a children's book to be.

After reading The Subtle Knife I decided that I would leave in our library but I would not recommend to anyone who isn't a mature sixth grader who is already reading a lot of similar fiction. It really isn't for younger children but is definitely YA and up.

Even for sixth grade, I don't know. That's how old I was when I first read The Golden Compass, and I found it pretty confusing and wasn't inspired to read The Subtle Knife when it came out. But I like to think I was mature....

On the bright side, I think this means that The Subtle Knife was the book that had been on my TBR list longest, so it's good to finally have it read.

Just wait until you get to the Amber Spyglass!

The series is definatly YA-heck, the movie version was even PG-13. I think many books we view as YA are really just older children-still juvenille, but more advanced than RL Stein. (I'm not entirely sure, but I think I just dated myself).

There are definitely books suitable for ages as young as 10 in YA but there are others that are more 13-14 and up.

heck, the movie version was even PG-13. I think many books we view as YA are really just older children

I've never been able to figure out what exactly YA means. If it were just about movie ratings, then anything without sex and bad language would be considered appropriate for children, when that's clearly not the case. Plus, a book can still be considered YA with plenty of sex and swearing (I'm thinking of Looking for Alaska here).

I was a hairs bredth away from being a young adult librarian. Near as I could tell, it meant dealing with anyone 14-22, but not yet reading standard adult literature. But it's not really a firm definition.

I think that's why I'm always confused; that period just didn't exist in my life. I only started keeping track of the books I read when I was sixteen, but that year I only read four YA books. Those were for a school reading program and I didn't actually enjoy them (I also reread one favourite children's book, and read another children's book in French). Are there really people in their 20s who read, but don't yet read adult books?

Since alot of manga and other graphic novels are considered YA, yes, there are plenty. And skipping the YA period in life is one of the main reasons I passed up the job.

I'm falling behind on my reading because of school, but I'll hopefully catch up once summer comes. My latest reads are Black Ships (Ancient World) and The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (Ancient World/Dewey Decimal Challenge). Black Ships was fantastic; the author manages to create an absolutely believable world out of a very problematic historical period, and it's a good story too. I avoided listing it earlier because I just couldn't think of high enough praise. It's the kind of book that I loved even more as time passed after finishing it, unlike those books that are enjoyable at the time but largely forgettable. I recommend it very highly to everyone.

The Buried Book, on the other hand, was less enjoyable. That's partly because of my incorrect assumptions going into it: I thought it would be history, but it's actually literary criticism, which isn't really my thing. I didn't think what history there was was very good, either; there's more detail about that in my review if anyone's interested.

I told myself at the beginning of the year that I was going to write more reviews, but so far it isn't really happening--that's number 2.

Wow, Zoe, I looked at the TBR Challenge - I am impressed. I know I could not commit myself to something like that - I even keep changing my 888 Challenge books and categories.

Heh, I've so far read only one of my TBR Challenge books.... I'm hoping to catch up in the summer.

Here's another of my periodic updates.... I've recently read Living Rich by Spending Smart (an ER book), which ended up in my "random" category; Babylon, Memphis, Persepolis, which is in the Dewey Decimal Challenge category for now but could equally belong in the Ancient World category; and The Thief and In the Coils of the Snake in Children's/YA Fiction. My updated list is in Message 7.

Of those four books, the one I rated most highly was Babylon, Memphis, Persepolis. I also really enjoyed reading In the Coils of the Snake, but I didn't like the portrayal of one of the characters.

I can see that my categories are starting to get pretty unbalanced now. I think this is partly because I fell so far behind during the school year that I'm tempted to read short books now to catch up, and the short books tend to fall in the Children's/YA category. I'm not going to change anything for now, though; it may still end up okay. My one consolation is that of my four most recent books, one of them fell in one of my TBR-reduction categories (the easiest one, but still).

Well, I'm still horribly behind, but I've made some good progress lately.

I read The Caliph's House and The Orientalizing Revolution in the Dewey Decimal Challenge category, Early Greek Science: Thales to Aristotle in the Math/Science category (it could have gone in the Dewey category too, but Math/Science needs much more help), and Life as We Knew It in the Children's/YA category. Life as We Knew It was great, The Caliph's House was a really enjoyable read, and the other two were definitely worth reading for the content, even if they weren't page-turners.

Early Greek Science also fits in one of my extra TBR-reduction categories, since I bought it in 2006. It's nice to see that I occasionally do get to the older books.

I just finished Year of Wonders, another really good book. After Life as We Knew It, I felt like reading another book about a catastrophic event, so I picked this one about plague out of my massive TBR pile. I'm glad I've finally read it; it had been sitting there for more than two years!

Since my last post, I've read The Origins of Greek Thought (Ancient World category), Bookstore Tourism (Random category), Woman of a Thousand Secrets (Adult fiction category), and Valiant (Children's/YA fiction category). I'm feeling an urge to revise my categories, though....

At this point, without cross-listing, I've done:
4/8 Dewey Decimal Challenge
2/8 Ancient World
1/8 Math/Science
6/8 Children's/YA Fiction
4/8 Adult Fiction
2/8 LT Group Reads
0/8 Already Started
3/8 Random

In my overlapping TBR-reduction categories, I've done:
3/8 Purchased July-December 2007
1/8 Purchased January-June 2007
4/8 Purchased before 2007

I'll keep updating my old list too, but my revised categories are:

8 Dewey Decimal Challenge
The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh
Babylon, Memphis, Persepolis: Eastern Contexts of Greek Culture
The Caliph's House
The Orientalizing Revolution
Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type
Empires of the Plain: Henry Rawlinson and the Lost Languages of Babylon
Me to We: Finding Meaning in a Material World

8 Ancient World (Fiction or Non-Fiction)
Black Ships
The Origins of Greek Thought
The Ancient Mediterranean World: From the Stone Age to AD 600
Ancient History: Monuments and Documents

8 Math/Science
Early Greek Science: Thales to Aristotle

8 Children's/YA Fantasy
The Golden Compass
The Subtle Knife
The Thief
In the Coils of the Snake
Valiant
Wicked Lovely
The Lightning Thief
Graceling

8 Historical Fiction
Slammerkin
Year of Wonders
Woman of a Thousand Secrets
The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits
The Saddlebag
Fingersmith

8 Childrens/YA Fiction
Turnabout
Life as We Knew It
An Abundance of Katherines
New Moon
Eclipse
Breaking Dawn
The Hunger Games
Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians

8 Just Because
Elantris
Ex Libris
Ella Minnow Pea
Living Rich by Spending Smart
Bookstore Tourism
Alcatraz Versus the Scrivener's Bones

8 Already-Started

I've been updating my list, but not posting new messages--I just realized my last one was more than two months ago!

At this point, the only two categories I'm really close to finishing are Dewey Decimal Challenge (2 left) and Fantasy (1 left). I haven't yet cross-listed any books, though; if I did that I could finish a category or two immediately (either Ancient World, or both Fiction and Non-Fiction). I think at this point Math/Science and Already-Started are pretty much hopeless, but I should be able to complete all the others.

Though Already-Started books do have the advantage of requiring less reading, since I'm already partway through.... So you never know.

Even though it's late in the game, I've decided to change my categories one more time. In my fantasy category, I've currenty read 7 books, and 6 are YA; the same goes for my fiction category. So, I'm planning to change one or both of those to make them more specific. The new categories would be Children's/YA Fiction and Children's/YA Fantasy. Then I'll change my extra non-fiction category (which currently only has 3 books in it) to Just Because.

I just finished The Hunger Games, completing my Children's/YA Fiction category. This is actually only the second category that I've completed (the other is Fantasy), but things aren't really as bad as they seem. I haven't counted any repeats yet, so that will let me complete at least two more categories (Ancient World and probably Just Because, each of which requires four more books). And I have two each left in Dewey Decimal Challenge and Historical Fiction, which seems doable. So Math/Science and Already Started are still the only hopeless categories.