If I did this Challenge. . .

. . . And I'm not saying I will. . .

Chris, bookworm extrordinaire, is always getting tangled in this web of book challenges over at his blog, Stuff As Dreams are Made On. It's a neat concept, much more attractive to me than the "community reading projects" you hear about from time to time--or the Oprah's Book Club kind of thing. For one thing, you don't get the impression that the people who start challenges have any hidden agenda other than to get other people to read what they want/like to read. In my discipline we get so caught up in balancing how much of what type of work and which kind of author and what social, political or intellectual currents, the whom-you-can't-leave-outs and the whom-you-should-really-includes according to this or that view go onto our various reading lists, from syllabi to prelim lists to works in papers and articles we write, etc., that I'm not sure we even know what it means to simply enjoy a work of literature anymore. Of course, this is a sweeping generalization, and so not entirely true, but you know what I mean. So I find this reading-blogging sub-culture is really cool. I want to get sucked into this level of enthusiasm. So Chris is currently doing one challenge (among many) that encourages people to read 10 books from a list of 1001 "must reads," thus making themselves 1% more well read. Certainly a noble cause. I could benefit from something like this, I think. So I perused the list. Many titles--er, most titles--are pretty unknown to me. And the ones I chose, I confess, are largely on my to read list anyway. And I'm not sure I can really do something like this--too many other things going on. But if I were to choose, and if cheating were permitted (that is, choosing with an eye to the "useful" or "things I planned to read anyway"), I would choose the following:

1) The Hours – Michael Cunningham
2) Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
3) The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
4) If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler – Italo Calvino
5) A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
6) Jacob’s Room – Virginia Woolf
7) Ulysses – James Joyce
8) Tono-Bungay – H.G. Wells
9) Ficciones – Jorge Luis Borges
10) The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – Milan Kundera

Only the last one is a complete unknown to me. Sounds intriguing, though. I want to keep my eye on these book challenges--and get motivated & excited & stuff!--and I actually signed up for real for a different challenge that I'm behind on, so I'll talk more about that soon! I've got an idea for a Lenten book challenge for next year--Catholic must-reads of various types: choose one book of apologetics, one of fiction, one encyclical. . . you get the idea! If you have suggestions, let me know!