Three and a half years ago, I started a Reading Challenge. My goal was to read 100 books that year, books that had "changed the world"... whatever that might mean. I started off with great intention and by June 30 had reached 50 books... on track to make 100 books by the end of December. But then... life happened and I had to put the Reading Challenge on hiatus. I still read books in the latter half of 2017, I just didn't document it or blog about it...
Now... as I reach the midpoint of 2020... it feels like the right time to pick up the Reading Challenge and complete it. I have a few books already here... and hope that the public library will provide a steady supply... but I am a bit at the whim of the library and which books are available in our local libraries. Inter-library loans and accessing the other libraries within our regional library system isn't necessarily going to work... but I am going to give it my best shot to stick with the list of books I had identified at the start of 2017. Although... I am adding several other books in the interest of racial diversity...
Right now, the list is looking like this... although it is a bit out of date, as there were a number of books I read in 2017 that aren't on this list... so it might get updated in the coming weeks... But for now... it's off to The Little Prince... followed by Demand the Impossible!
| Status | Title | Author | Year | Pages | ||
| 1 | done | Freedom Writers Diary | Erin | Gruwell | 1999 | 316 |
| 2 | done | Nineteen Eighty Four (1984) | George | Orwell | 1949 | 407 |
| 3 | done | Silent Spring | Rachel | Carson | 1962 | 378 |
| 4 | done | Brave New World | Aldous | Huxley | 1932 | 268 |
| 5 | done | Ways of Seeing | John | Berger | 1972 | 176 |
| 6 | done | Here Comes Everybody | Clay | Shirky | 2008 | 336 |
| 7 | done | Sand County Almanac | Aldo | Leopold | 1949 | 269 |
| 8 | Done | Autobiography of Malcolm X | Malcolm | X | 1965 | 466 |
| 9 | done | Eating Animals | Jonathan | Safran Foer | 2009 | 341 |
| 10 | done | Tattoos on the Heart | Gregory | Boyle | 2009 | 240 |
| 11 | done | War and Peace | Leo | Tolstoy | 1865 | 1392 |
| 12 | done | Nature & Other Writings | Ralph Waldo | Emerson | 1995 | 225 |
| 13 | done | The Upcycle | William | McDonough | 2013 | 256 |
| 14 | done | The Spirit Level | Richard | Wilkinson | 2009 | 372 |
| 15 | done | The Necessary Revolution | Peter | Senge | 2008 | 406 |
| 16 | done | Keeping the Bees | Laurence | Packer | 2016 | 288 |
| 17 | done | The Town that Food Saved | Ben | Hewitt | 2010 | 242 |
| 18 | done | Wuthering Heights | Emily | Bronte | 1847 | 214 |
| 19 | reading | The Little Prince | Antoine | de Saint-Exupery | 1943 | 83 |
| 20 | reading | Demand the Impossible | Bill | Ayers | 2016 | 150 |
| 21 | Have it | The Alchemist | Paulo | Coelho | 1988 | 197 |
| 22 | have it | Night | Elie | Wiesel | 1958 | 120 |
| 23 | on hold | So you want to talk about race | Ijeoma | Oluo | 2019 | 266 |
| 24 | on hold | White Fragility | Robin J. | DiAngelo | 2018 | 187 |
| 25 | on hold | From the Ashes | Jessie | Thistle | 2019 | 369 |
| 26 | on hold | A Long Walk to Water | Linda Sue | Park | 2010 | 133 |
| 27 | on hold | Things Fall Apart | Chinua | Achebe | 2009 | 224 |
| 28 | on hold | Burger's Daughters | Nadine | Gordimer | 1980 | 364 |
| 29 | Public Lib | The Second Sex | Simone | de Beauvoir | 1949 | 746 |
| 30 | Public Lib | Non-Violent Resistance | Mahatma | Gandhi | 1961 | 432 |
| 31 | Public Lib | Walden | Henry David | Thoreau | 1854 | 352 |
| 32 | Public Lib | Brief History of Time | Stephen | Hawking | 1987 | 212 |
| 33 | Public Lib | I am Nujood | Nujood | Ali | 2009 | 188 |
| 34 | Public Lib | The True Believer | Erich | Hoffer | 2010 | 240 |
| 35 | Public Lib | Shake Hands with the Devil | Romeo | Dallaire | 2003 | 562 |
| 36 | Public Lib | Orientalism | Edward | Said | 1978 | 395 |
| 37 | Public Lib | Qur'an | 650 | 604 | ||
| 38 | Public Lib | General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money | John Maynard | Keynes | 1935 | 403 |
| 39 | Public Lib | Das Kapital | Karl | Marx | 1867 | 356 |
| 40 | Public Lib | Rights of Man | Thomas | Paine | 1791 | 229 |
| 41 | Public Lib | The Sixth Extinction | Elizabeth | Kolbert | 2014 | 319 |
| 42 | Public Lib | I am Malala | Malala | Yousafzai | 2012 | 327 |
| 43 | Public Lib | Uncle Tom's Cabin | Harriet Beecher | Stowe | 1852 | 438 |
| 44 | Public Lib | The Jungle | Upton | Sinclair | 1905 | 335 |
| 45 | Public Lib | Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee | Dee | Brown | 1970 | 509 |
| 46 | Public Lib | The Art of War | Sun | Tzu | -450 | 273 |
| 47 | Public Lib | The Republic | Plato | -380 | 416 | |
| 48 | Public Lib | Tao te Ching | Lao | Tzu | -300 | 160 |
| 49 | Public Lib | Critique of Pure Reason | Immanuel | Kant | 1781 | 796 |
| 50 | Public Lib | Mein Kampf | Adolf | Hitler | 1925 | 384 |
| 51 | Public Lib | Diary of a Young Girl | Anne | Frank | 1947 | 283 |
| 52 | Public Lib | Survival in Auschwitz | Primo | Levi | 1958 | 187 |
| 53 | Public Lib | Adios America | Ann | Coulter | 2015 | 392 |
| 54 | Public Lib | Tibetan Book of the Dead | Padmasambhava | 700 | 592 | |
| 55 | Public Lib | The Meaning of Relativity | Albert | Einstein | 1922 | 176 |
| 56 | Public Lib | The Search for Roots | Primo | Levi | 2003 | 258 |
| 57 | Public Lib | Rise and Fall of the Third Reich | William | Shirer | 1960 | 1614 |
| 58 | Public Lib | Don Quixote | Miguel | Cervantes | 1605 | 1023 |
| 59 | University | The Sane Society | Erich | Fromm | 2003 | 384 |
| 60 | University | Hiroshima | John | Hersey | 1946 | 152 |
| 61 | University | The Feminine Mystique | Betty | Friedan | 1963 | 592 |
| 62 | University | Hard Green | Peter W. | Huber | 1999 | 224 |
| 63 | ILL | Deep Work | Cal | Newport | 2016 | 296 |
| 64 | ILL | The Earth Has a Soul | C.G. | Jung | 2002 | 248 |
| 65 | ILL | Steal this Book | Abbie | Hoffman | 1971 | 352 |
| 66 | ILL | Deep Green Resistance | Aric | McBay | 2011 | 520 |
| 67 | ILL | A Vindication of the Rights of Women | Mary | Wollstonecraft | 1790 | 352 |
| 68 | ILL | Communist Manifesto | Karl | Marx | 1848 | 288 |
| 69 | ILL | The Story of my Experiments with Truth | Mahatma | Gandhi | 1940 | 560 |
| 70 | ILL | Fascism - What It is and How to Fight it | Leon | Trotsky | 1944 | 47 |
| 71 | ILL | Imagined Communities | Benedict | Anderson | 1983 | 240 |
| 72 | ILL | Lifelong Activist | Hillary | Rettig | 2006 | 399 |
| 73 | ILL | Inglorious Empire | Shashi | Tharoor | 2018 | 336 |
| 74 | no idea | Guerilla Warfare | Che | Guevara | 1960 | 440 |
| 75 | no idea | Mohammed Code | Howard | Bloom | 2013 | 342 |
| 76 | no idea | The Man Who Fed the World | Leon | Hesser | 2006 | 263 |
| 77 | no idea | The Wretched of the Earth | Frantz | Fanon | 2007 | 324 |
| 78 | no idea | Confessions of a Mask | Yukio | Mishima | 1958 | 256 |