Dewey’s Books Challenge Wrap-Up

It’s near the end of year and I have a bunch of challenges need wrapping up. I’ll start with Dewey’s Books Reading Challenge since it’s probably the first that I completed a long time ago, and Chris has called for a wrap-up post on the challenge blog.

It wasn’t a big challenge for me because a lot of things I read seemed to be read and reviewed by Dewey, being a fierce reader that she was. The challenge required us to read 5 books reviewed by Dewey. I read 12, and probably more, since her site was down soon after and it made it harder to track what was posted on her blog.

The books I read: (Note that Dewey’s links are down. I got the links from her blog feed.)

1. The Tale of One Bad Rat by Bryan Talbot [my review] [Dewey’s review (2008)]
2. The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett [my review] [Dewey’s review (2008)]
3. The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly [my review] [Dewey’s review (2008)]
4. The Sandman Vol 1: Preludes & Nocturnes by Neil Gaiman [my review] [Dewey’s review (2008)]
5. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling [my review] [Dewey’s review (2007)]
6. The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman [my review] [Dewey’s review (2008)]
7. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman [my review] [Dewey’s review (2008)]
8. The Color Purple by Alice Walker [my review] [Dewey’s review (2008)]
9. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini [my review] [Dewey’s review (2008)]
10. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling [my review] [Dewey’s review (2007)]
11. Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie [my review] [Dewey’s review (2008)]
12. American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang [my review] [Dewey’s review (2008)]

I don’t recall for sure, but I think the ones in blue are books that I read because of Dewey. She was definitely one of people that introduced me to the world of Western graphic novels (which I previously thought were only about super-heroes).

The challenge won’t continue, but I make my personal challenge next year to read The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, which was the last book that Dewey read, probably unfinished. I remember vividly that I had a slight thought when I saw the book posted on her “Reading” section a couple of days before she passed away: Why is she reading that? The title and cover doesn’t sound and look interesting.

Of course that was before the book took blogosphere by storm and everybody seems to be reading it. Dewey was often a pioneer that way.

To Dewey.