End of Summer Challenge
It’s official, our summer challenge ended yesterday! Judges will need some time to determine several of the winners. Think you should win? Plead your case and tell us why your choices merit either “most creative” or “most true to the spirit of the game.” Don’t be modest. Stay tuned for the announcement on September 27th. Combined you all read an astonishing 370 books, 123,266 pages, and traveled to all sorts of destinations all around the world (and in some cases outside this world).
In the final week, “Ursula” came out of nowhere and completed all her destinations – joining “Nanny Ogg” as the only two who completed everything. I purposely set the number of destinations at 30 with the assumption that no one would be able to read 30 books in the three months. I was wrong. Charisma also made a last minute push to enter the scoreboard at 5 points (although her son, “Maxibob” earned bragging rights in their home by crushing her). Special mention to “Chili” who read more pages than the leaders but with fewer books.
Congrats to everyone who participated! Now that the competition is over we want to hear from all of you. Did you like the competition? What was your favorite and least favorite read of the challenge? Which was your favorite and least favorite destinations? Did you read any books that you likely would not have read outside this competition?
Here was the final scoreboard:
Frequent Flyers (a.k.a the scoreboard):
Nanny Ogg -33 (pages read: 10,479): Completed 9/21
Ursula – 33 (pages read: 8,826). Completed 9/21
Glo-worm – 29 (pages read: 9,448)
Tracy S – 26 (pages read: 7,362)
Anne Shirley – 26 (pages read: 7,246)
Chili -24 (pages read: 10,508)
Maxibob-24 (pages read 6,346)
LibraryCin – 22 (pages read: 7,006)
Rachel Morgan – 22 (pages read: 6,767)
Jaenelle Angelline-16 (pages read: 5,056)
Sushicat – 15 (pages read: 4,668)
Aarti -15 (pages read: 3,760)
Nicole – 14 (pages read: 5,376)
Second Honeymoon – 13 (pages read: 3,821)
Luna – 13 (pages read: 3,141)
Morgen -10 (pages read: 4,108)
Nia -9 (pages read: 2,646)
Tanya -8 (pages read: 2,303)
Jean Paget – 8 (pages read: 1,638)
John -6 (pages read: 3,070)
Jo March -6 (pages read: 2,887)
Tiger Lily – 6 (pages read: 1,870)
Charisma – 5 (pages read: 1,439)
Emily -5 (pages read: 1,308)
Becky -3 (pages read: 1,150)
Yvonne – 2 (pages read: 541)
Kate T – 2 (pages read: 479)
Missy Bee – 1 (pages read: 336)
We wanted to post this photo that goo-worm sent us that highlights one goal of this competition – to get you to diversify and broaden your reading. She found this book that she had borrowed from her grandfather over a decade ago and finally found a reason to read it.
NOTE: We will be announcing a new Halloween competition at the beginning of October. This competition will last for 1 month and will involve a maximum of 4 books. It’s designed to be a more relaxed challenge and we hope you join us.
jenp27
Nicole Del Sesto
The Reader's Room 
I loved this challenge! I don’t think I read 10 books all last year and the competition really helped me get back into reading more. Most of the books I read were on to-read my list. Now that the list is so much shorter, time to add more books!
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Awesome! So glad it renewed your reading and helped decrease your TBR list.
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Thank you for the mention. This was the first reading challenge I participated in and I loved it! I can’t wait for the next one. I discovered authors I had never read before and can’t wait to read more of their books, especially Graham Greene and Cormac McCarthy. My favorite book was a tie between East Of Eden and The Iliad. My least favorite was Gravity’s Rainbow, I hated that book. I want to thank you for conducting this challenge, it was awesome.
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I’m so glad you did discovered some new favorites. I haven’t read any Pynchon yet. I keep delaying it because I have a feeling he isn’t an author I would love
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East of Eden is one of my favourite books of all time
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I cannot believe I read so much in page numbers finishing only 3 books, one of which was tiny… I had fun though. A lot of it was with my choice of Russia. I actually wanted to read Gogol, but wasn’t sure if he’ll be considered Russian, given he’s Ukrainian and he mostly wrote in Ukrainian. So I decided to go with Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and am I ever glad I did! I couldn’t, literally, stop reading it; I read it every spare minute of my day. (And I didn’t have many, trust me.) If only all my destinations were somehow related to Russia and/or Russian, I could have definitely read more. I think I miss my native language a lot these days… Well, moving to another country doesn’t help either.
I know I do not deserve either title, but I want to brag about my 12-year-old son. Not only did he start almost a month later and was in school this past month, but he also read a few adult books, like Cloud Atlas that was not an easy read even for me, or some well known classic books, like Animal Farm, or The Old Man and the Sea.
I realize, that a lot of you here were probably reading similar books at his age, but I know him, and it is extremely hard to introduce him to anything more challenging than a comic book, or an adventure series for a 12-year-old with a lot of action and no useful vocabulary whatsoever. Yet here I somehow managed to find a lot of good books that he genuinely enjoyed. He wants to read more of Bradbury and Hemingway, and he enjoyed reading poetry (Hurricane Dancers by Margarita Engle), which are a big PLUS. He absolutely loved Animal Farm, which I knew he would, but I didn’t expect him to pick up on some hidden, adult things with such ease. (I apologize for some of his reviews, especially the last ones. I discussed what he wrote with him, and he updated his reviews, but I forgot and posted them as they were in the beginning, so some of them sound weird.)
Overall, I believe that, even though he didn’t read the most pages, and he didn’t visit all the location, he is the “most true to the spirit of the game” and deserves the title.
Thank you so much for reading. I cannot wait for the next challenge!
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Your son did an awesome job! Had he started at the beginning of the challenge, I have now doubt he would be among those who completed. I’m glad he found some new authors/books he liked.
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Thank you so much for organizing the challenge. I don’t know what I would have done if he wasn’t busy reading 🙂
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Congratulations to both of you! I don’t think that I was nearly as adventurous a reader as your son at that age. I hope that the fire stays lit and he leaves us all in his dust the next challenge he joins.
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Thank you so much, Kate, you’re a person to follow and I’d love for him to read as much and as diverse a literature as you do. He does certainly enjoy reading. Unfortunately he rarely ventures outside his comfort zone, so I have to do it for him. I think with this challenge he sees that I’m right and sometimes you find real gems in the crowd.
P.S. We’re learning homeschooling, and were extremely busy this past week with school homework, he had hardly any time to read books for the challenge. He was actually curious what place he finished at, but had no time today to check it. He’ll be surprised to see how high he is and this is a reward on its own.
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So awesome that you involved your son. I’m not sure that I could get through Cloud Atlas now, let alone at 12. I’m sure that it was a fun project for the two of you!
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You wouldn’t believe it, but his favourite part was the 6th part. But he had help: both a print book and an audio book, so he could get through it easier.
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Between this challenge and Around the World in 80 Days on Shelfari I am exhausted. I’ve been recuperating for the past several days and have only limped through one book in nearly a week.
But it was a lot of fun! Favorite reads were In the Shadow of the Banyan and Funhome. The second one I was planning on reading anyway but I never would have discovered Banyan if your contest hadn’t sparked me to go looking for a book set in Cambodia. The other highlight would have to be revisiting the nature writing of Gerald Durrell. I hadn’t read him in many years but he was the first author that came to mind when I saw Madagascar on the destination list.
Least favorite, hands down The Ludwig Conspiracy. I shudder to think of it. I’ve had another book by the same author on my kindle for ages but I’m afraid to even look at it. There is even value to finding out what you don’t like though. Thanks for an educational experience 🙂
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I loved the challenge! Of course, I did “cheat” a bit a read some shorter works, however, most of them were already on my radar.
My favorites were The Girl on the Train and Among the Unseen (3rd book in a trilogy). My least favorites were: The Awakening (Kate Chopin) and Ghost of Chance (William S Burroughs).
When I look at the stats for the books: 15 books I already owned. An additional 5 were either books or authors that were on my want to read list (not really an official list). I read 3 “classics”, 1 Hugo/Nebula winner (same book) and read 2 trilogies start to finish (which I already owned the first book). I read 18 “new to me” authors — of which, I would read most of them again. I got 7 books from the library, listened to 16 books on audio, 10 ebook (some were audio/ebook combo so I could go back and forth). Of all the books I read, 23 of the books involved some type of travel by the main characters as major plot point.
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I’m Ursula BTW. I picked Ursula because my avatar on Shelfari is an octopus with books on each arm 😀
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I loved this challenge! It was creative and made me expand into books I would not typically read. I only managed to read 6 books with my hectic summer schedule. I am actually still currently working on the book I was hoping to finish before the challenge. It is definitely outside of my normal reading but I am really enjoying it! I am looking forward to the next challenge.
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Thank you so much for this challenge! When I signed up I mentioned that I hoped it would help me out of a rather long reading slump I’ve been in and it has. I didn’t get very many read as I really didn’t hit a stride until Sept., but I’m so glad I participated. Can’t wait for the next challenge!
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I’m so glad you were able to join us. We are announcing a Halloween challenge tomorrow that is relatively low-key. We have some other fun ones in the works including a March madness challenge in the spring.
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very fun, would have liked to finish and actually planned to try, but alas … Life.
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