Challenge Wrap-Up: Fall Into Reading 2010

The 2010 edition of the Fall Into Reading Challenge, hosted by Katrina at Callapidder Days, ended with the season, on December 20th. Once again, I read a dozen books during the challenge. Also once again, most of the books I read weren't on my list of possible reads when I started the challenge. But that's OK – I had fun, discovered a few new authors, revisited several old favorites, and polished off a number of books that had been on my TBR list for decades.

So I'm declaring this another challenge successfully completed. The one thing I haven't been too successful at is writing reviews of the books I read. Sorry about that. I still intend to post a few more of those in the next few days, and I'll add links as I do it.

Here's my list of books read, with links to the reviews that do exist:

1. Cards on the Table. Agatha Christie
   
2. The House Next Door. Anne Rivers Siddons
   
3. Book of Shadows. Alexandra Sokoloff
   
4. Animal Farm. George Orwell
   
5. The Dark Half. Stephen King
   
6. After Claude. Iris Owens
   
7. The Vanishing of Katharina Linden. Helen Grant
   
8. We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Shirley Jackson
   
9. The Distant Hours. Kate Morton
   
10. Juliet. Anne Fortier
    
11. The Weird Sisters. Eleanor Brown
    
12. The Thirty-Nine Steps. John Buchan
    

It would be really hard to choose a favorite from among those titles. I believe I was most pleasantly surprised by Book of Shadows by Alexandra Sokoloff – a new discovery for me. And I especially enjoyed Cards on the Table, as it featured my favorite Agatha Christie character, Ariadne Oliver. But I enjoyed all the other books too – not one of them was really awful!

Fall Into Reading 2010

It's that time of year again. School is back in session. Leaves are starting to change color and drift toward the pavement. New TV shows are already being canceled. Footballs are flying all over the place. It must be fall! Time for one of my favorite seasonal events - the Fall Into Reading Challenge, hosted annually by Katrina at Callapidder Days.

Fall Into Reading 2010 runs from today through December 20th, and it's a very low-pressure challenge, with almost no rules (but you can read all about that on the challenge page here). And it's a wonderful way to help reduce the size of that frighteningly enormous TBR pile.

My reading list is definitely subject to change and unrealistically long, but these are some of the books I'm thinking of reading this fall:

Afternoon Men. Anthony Powell
Alice I Have Been. Melanie Benjamin
Animal Farm. George Orwell
Bad Boy. Peter Robinson
Cards on the Table. Agatha Christie (reading now)
The Dark Half. Stephen King (reading now)
Dead Man's Folly. Agatha Christie
The House Next Door. Anne Rivers Siddons
The House on Tradd Street. Karen White
I Am Madame X. Gioia Diliberto
Juliet. Anne Fortier (reading now)
Moonlight Mile. Dennis Lehane
Mr. Murder. Dean Koontz
Mrs. McGinty's Dead. Agatha Christie
The Prince of Mist. Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Relic. Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Room. Emma Donoghue
The Sign of the Book. John Dunning
Spider Web. Penelope Lively
A Stir of Echoes. Richard Matheson
The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise. Julia Stuart
We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Shirley Jackson
The Women. T.C. Boyle
One of the Mrs. Murphy mysteries by Rita Mae Brown
Something by Nina Bawden
Something by Muriel Spark

So, that's the tentative book list. There is, of course, no way I could get through all those titles in the next three months. But whatever develops, I'll be updating my progress on my challenge blog during the run of the challenge.