Summer Challenge Update #7

It’s time for a Summer Challenge update!  In each update, we will give an honorable mention to the reader who posts our favorite book-location pairing since time of last update. Keep reading to find out who is in the lead and to get some ideas for your book locations.

The final day of the challenge will be September 22. You can submit your last review anytime up until midnight of your time zone (just let us know which time zone you are in when you post). Will anyone make all destinations? Nanny Ogg is pretty close but still has 5 more destinations left. I purposely put the number of destinations at 30 because I didn’t think anyone would even get close, but she may make it!

As I mentioned last week, page counts matter for the “most well-travelled” prize. The way this will work will be that each person whose page count is higher than the person listed at the top (most likely Kate) will get one additional point for every additional 300 pages they exceed this person. So for example say the top person reads 28 destinations at 7000 pages but the person in 3rd place has read 26 destinations at 7941 pages. The person in third will then get assigned an additional 3 points putting them in first place for the prize. Let us know if you have any questions about point assignment.

We will have a set of criteria that we create to judge our two “subjective” prizes (e.g., most creative and most true to the spirit of the challenge). Want to increase your chances? When you are done with your reading, you are welcome to add a comment to your thread pleading your case for why you should win either of the those two categories.

Winners of all prizes will be announced on September 27 so make sure to check back on that day to see if you won. Our new challenge (and more low-key challenge) will also be announced on that day!

Here are the standings to date:

Frequent Flyers (a.k.a the scoreboard):
Nanny Ogg -27 (pages read: 7,563)
Glo-worm – 22 (pages read: 6,878)
Anne Shirley – 21 (pages read: 6,427)
Tracy S – 21 (pages read: 5,739)
Ursula – 20 (pages read: 5,999)
LibraryCin – 19 (pages read: 5,902)
Chili -18 (pages read: 8,020)
Rachel Morgan – 18 (pages read: 5,460)
Maxibob-17 (pages read 4,417)
Aarti -15 (pages read: 3,441)
Jaenelle Angelline-13 (pages read: 3,982)
Nicole – 12 (pages read: 3,943)
Luna – 12 (pages read: 2,064)
Second Honeymoon – 10 (pages read: 2,925)
Sushicat – 9 (pages read: 3,771) +3 when all group members have finished.
Jean Paget – 8 (pages read: 1,638)
Morgen -7 (pages read: 2,792)
Nia -7 (pages read: 2,387)
John -6 (pages read: 3,070)
Tiger Lily – 6 (pages read: 1,870)
Jo March -5 (pages read: 1,791)
Emily -5 (pages read: 1,308)
Tanya -4 (pages read: 1,488)
Becky -4 (pages read: 1,150)
Yvonne – 2 (pages read: 541)
Kate T – 2 (pages read: 479)
Missy Bee – 1 (pages read: 336)

Honorable mentions: Jen’s two favorite location-book pairing since last update were read by chili with The Road by McCarthy for Traveling with children and Tanya with Heist Society by Ally Carter for Artsy Vacation. Book Worm will pick the honorable mentions next week.

Friendly Reminder to participants: If you end up needing to buy any books for this challenge, please do so through our Amazon link. If you go to the store first, you can then go to other Amazon pages by clicking the “powered by Amazon” logo at the top right of the store page (under “Browse by Category). This will enable you find your own books outside the store.

Need some feeling stuck? Here are some book destination ideas:
China: Here is a list of best Chinese Fiction books of the last century by Time Out magazine. Here is a GoodReads list of the“best novels that take place in china.”

Australia: Here is the Guardian Australia’s best books of 2014. And, here is a list of 50 Australian books from Booktopia blog.

Culinary Vacation: you can go many different directions here: Recipe books, chef biographies, fiction with a food focus, and so on. Here is Food & Wine’s list of books for food lovers – Many are chef memoirs and non-fiction. Bon Appetit’s list includes both fiction and non-fiction books.