Summer Reading Challenge Update

Welcome to our first update in the Summer Reading Challenge! We have a lot of people joining us for this challenge and we hope you are all having fun picking out your books. Haven’t joined yet? There is still time to sign up and receive your virtual passport.

Every two weeks or so we will be posting an update on the challenge along with some ideas for book locations. We’ll also give an honorable mention to the reader who posts our favorite book-location pairing over the two weeks.

It’s only been one week but many of you have already traveled to at least one book destination. Remember you have 3 months to read so there’s no rush! Here’s how the scoreboard currently stands:

Frequent Flyers:
Jaenelle Angelline-4
Nanny Ogg -3
Emily -2
Kate T – 2
Ursula – 2
Aarti -2
Sushicat – 1
Jean Paget – 1
Glo-worm – 1
Luna – 1
LibraryCin – 1
Chili -1
Anne Shirley – 1
Rachel Morgan – 1
Second Honeymoon – 1

If you see any errors, let us know!

Honorable mentions: Jen’s favorite location-book pairing was read “Second Honeymoon” with her choice of The Water Horse for Loch Ness. This was my favorite because it is one of the hardest categories and she actually found a book about a monster from Loch Ness. BW’s favorite location-pairing was read by Jolene for “Off the beaten path.” She selected Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. You don’t get much more off the beaten path than that.

Prizes: While we won’t be revealing the prizes (yet), I will give you a clue about what we will be awarding. We will be handing out cool prizes for the following: (1) Most traveled (most destinations completed in their passport. If you run out, we can assign more); (2) Most creative (person who thinks outside the box and gives us the best justifications for their location-book reads; (3) Most faithful to the challenge (the person whose books choices best fit the locations assigned); and (4) one randomly selected traveler (randomly selected from everyone who reads at least one book). NOTE: some have asked about and are reading children’s books. That is fine and will count toward all prizes with a small exception. For most traveled we will take into account the number of pages and level of difficulty in the books you read. So someone who reads 1000+ pages for India (John) will have an edge over someone who reads a children’s book for India.

Friendly reminder: If you do end up buying any books from Amazon for this challenge, please do so through our store link: The Readers Room Store. If you start off from this link then search for whatever book you want, a small percentage comes back to us (we’re talking about 10-30 cents per book). We use all profits to give back to you in prizes.

Need some ideas? Here are some links to help you come up with books for your destinations. We’ll be featuring a few of these links each time we do an update so look out for your location if you feel stuck. Needless to say, all these books would be approved.

• Music Festival: Article by the Guardian titled: Musicians and writers choose their favourite book about music.
• Brazil: Book Riot’s article on Brazilian Literature:  Where to Start with Brazilian Literature
• First Visit (debut novel): Flavorwire’s 50 of the Greatest Debut Novels. Also, check out our reviews of Among the Ten Thousand Things by Pierpont and The Color of Our Sky by Amita Trasi. Both good debut novels that are being released in the next two weeks.