AA1986's 13 in '13

Last year my goal was 84 books in 12 categories, and the end total was 42 (although I may sneak one more in before the year is out). I think I can do better this year, although since I've never completed one of these 'X# in Year' challenges I can't really do worse. :) I tried to do a mix of specific and general categories in 2012, and I think this year I want to be more specific. That way I can make some headway on my other challenges.

1. Shakespeare: one play a month, inspired by Shakespeare Allowed! in Nashville. I'm trying to read the histories in chronological order.
2. Star Wars: one a month
3. Modern Nations: to both round-out my knowledge of modern nations, and make a little headway on my Reading Globally challenge.
4. Geek Girl Book Club: one a month.
5. Hebrew language: fiction (or non-) written in Hebrew
6. Education: mainly focusing on Charlotte Mason's Original Home Education Series (six books).
7. POTUS biographies: I think I'll read biographies for the first six presidents (six books).
8. 1001 Books...Before You Die: I noticed several of the group reads are in this list, and I own them. I'll make sure to include those (six books).
9. Newbery Challenge: Reading through the Newbery medal winners (six books).
10. The Bible: After ten years of attempting to read it, I still have not finished the Old Testament. I made some progress in 2012, but not as much as I had hoped. I'm going to aim for one book a month for the next year.
11. Started but Unfinished: I have a long list of books I started and abandoned. Many of them are non-fiction books I read portions of for a course or fiction from English courses, but had to move on before finishing (six books)
12. The Time Quintet: I think I've had these books since middle or high school, and never read them (five books).
13. Libertarian Reading Challenge: 31 days of reading articles and book excerpts, followed by one book a month for the year.

1. 12
2. 12
3. 6
4. 12
5. 6
6. 6
7. 6
8. 6
9. 6
10. 12
11. 6
12. 5
13. 11

Total: 106

Hmmmmm. We'll see.

Hi welcome ArmyAngel1986 ! Now I'm interested by what goes in the Geek Girl Book Club ? I hear you for the Started but Unfinished but in my case it does involve fiction too sigh ... Looking forward to read your thread.

Hi and welcome! I love your categories and YAY! for someone who likes specificity in their categories! Really looking forward to seeing exactly what books you pick as most of the categories are ones I could have picked myself.

I admire you for reading in Hebrew, it's a beautiful language and I wish I could understand even one word of it. (Beautiful writing as well!)

If you're having difficulty reading the Bible I'd recommend downloading the National Theatre's podcast reading of the King James Bible. I just finished listening to it and loved the reading - and I've never read the whole Bible before. All the readers are great and they take turns reading making it almost like a play (though there are parts when they shift narrators a bit to often). I would never have made it through the thing without this version.
The Songs of Solomon is particularly nicely read.
I'm not sure it they skipped a couple of the shorter books in the OT - I don't remember hearing about Esther for instance but I could just hade nodded off slightly.

Like electrice I'm curious to see what the Geek Girl Book Club entails and though I haven't read the other books in the series, I can heartily recommend A Wrinkle in Time. I read it as an adult and kept thinking "I wish I'd read this as a child - I would have loved physics in school if I'd know about this".

Thanks, y'all!

I thought I had included the link to the GGBC site, but I forgot it! It's there now. Once a month we read a sci fi or fantasy book. We do a mix of classics, contemporary, and new authors. I read four of last years selections and started two, and they were: Ready Player One, Dragonflight, Redshirts, The Beekeeper's Apprentice, Leviathan, and H. P. Lovecraft's short stories. So that's three sci fi, one fantasy, one mystery (Beekeeper's Apprentice is a Sherlock Holmes story), and one horror collection.

For the Bible, I started using Bible Study Tools, which makes a reading schedule for you based on what kind of program you want to follow (year, 90 days, etc). This has been the greatest help to me in making progress.

Paws, if you're interested in studying Hebrew at your own pace, may I recommend a site I'm putting together? My experience studying Hebrew at grad school led me to collect all the resources I used to study on my own (since classroom instruction was...less than what it could have been). There are links to sites that will teach you the alef-bet (including a speaker so you know how they sound), and to learn the Hebrew keyboard; plus all my online flashcards for the first four levels of Hebrew. Well, the first two levels are there completely. The third and fourth levels are still incomplete, but I'm working on them.

I love that there is a GGBC site. I'm going to check it out. (Yet another source of recommendations - just what I need.) Hope you have a successful challenge this year!

That sounds amazing, but it's not something I'd have the time or patience for at the moment. I've got enough on my language plate by trying to keep what left of my French...

I'll definitely be checking out the GGBC site - sounds great! (Just my kind of people!)

I hear you. My Hebrew tutor studied German, French, and Greek all at the same time (in addition to being fluent in Hebrew, Russian, and English). I was in awe of him, it took all I had to just keep up with the one language!

If y'all are into social networking, the GGBC is also on Facebook (look up Twitter Geek Girls Book Club), and that's where most of the book discussions happen. We also do a lot of chatting about other geeky things as well, and love to have new members!

Wow, that's incredible. I wasn't able to study French and Spanish at the same time (I got them mixed up in my head) so had to drop Spanish - best thing I ever did. I would love to be able to speak more languages though - German and Russian are at the top of my list if I ever get round to it.

You've reminded me about a mini-project I have. I want to have my name transliterated into different alphabets and I didn't have Hebrew in my list (it's there now).

I completely forgot about one of the other challenges I want to do, so #13 has been replaced and my total is up to 106 books for the year.

Your categories look awesome. I've wanted to learn Hebrew since forever (I was in Hebrew school as a child but hated Sunday school with a burning passion, and it was required in order to do Hebrew (and get bat mitzvahed, of course), but I just couldn't stand it so I quit, and hence had to quit Hebrew :( lol), that's fabulous you can read it. I'll be reading the Time quintet also; I read them as a child (1st four only I think) and adored them, but remember so little, I need to reread!! :D

The GGBC sounds like lots of fun, but I stay as far away from FB as possible, and don't have any google accts and can't stand Twitter either, so I guess it's not for me. :|

Welcome back!! Looking forward to following along. I'll be reading some Israeli fiction as well, but not in Hebrew - my speaking skills are decent, but I need nikudot to read, so I'm sticking to my children's books for that... :)

Wow, I'm the reverse: My speaking skills are mediocre (took ages of blood, sweat, and tears, and more tears, to develop them), but reading without nikudot was never a problem. Of course, they never really taught us the nikudot either, so it was a sink or swim situation.

My ex is Israeli so I got some of it by osmosis, but he's moved back now and I don't use it very often. I'd much rather be able to read - trade you? :)

Sorry, nope! I'm holding onto what I learned; learning it was too painful to give anything up!

Also, I didn't realize today is New Year's Eve, so happy New Year to you all!

1. Shakespeare (12)

2. Star Wars (12)

3. Modern Nations (6)

4. Geek Girl Book Club (12)

1. Paper Towns
2. The Ocean at the End of the Lane
3. Jaws

5. Hebrew language (6)

6. Charlotte Mason's Original Home Education Series (6)

7. POTUS biographies (6)

8. 1001 Books...Before You Die (6)

1. The Woman in White

9. Newbery Challenge (6)

10. The Bible (12)

1. Kings 1
2. Kings 2
3. Chronicles 1
4. Chronicles 2
5. Ezra
6. Nehemiah
7. Esther
8. Ecclesiastes
9. Song of Solomon
10. Daniel
11. Hosea
12. Joel
13. Amos
14. Obadiah
15. Jonah
16. Micah
17. Nahum
18. Habakkuk
19. Zephaniah
20. Haggai
21. Zechariah
22. Malachi

11. Started but Unfinished (6)

1. Leviathan

12. The Time Quintet (5)

1. A Wrinkle in Time
2. A Wind in the Door

13. Libertarian Reading Challenge (31 articles and book excerpts, and 11 books)

Day 1: The Task Confronting Libertarians
Day 2: The Fascist Threat
Day 3: Free Economy and Social Order
Day 4: The Peculiar and Unique Position of Economics
Day 5: What Soviet Medicine Teaches Us
Day 6: Economic Depressions: Their Cause and Cure
Day 7: Is Greater Productivity a Danger?
Day 8: The Truth About Taxes
Day 9: Hitler Was a Keynesian
Day 10: Seeing the Unseen
Day 11: The Watermelon Summit
Day 12: On Equality and Inequality
Day 13: Praxeology
Day 14: The Health Plan's Devilish Principles
Day 15: Vices Are Not Crimes
Day 16: Repudiating the National Debt
Day 17: The Fallacy of the 'Public Sector'
Day 18: The Road to Totalitarianism
Day 19: The Many Collapses of Keynesianism
Day 20: The Crippling Nature of Minimum Wage Laws
Day 21: Who Owns Water?
Day 22: Defending the Slumlord
Day 23: The Freedom of Association
Day 24: Open Letter to the International Justice Mission
Day 25: Everything You Love You Owe to Capitalism
Day 26: Is There a Right to Unionize?
Day 27: What If Public Schools Were Abolished?
Day 28: Why Austrian?
Day 29: Economics and Moral Courage
Day 30: Do You Hate the State?
Day 31: Anatomy of the State

February: Vices Are Not Crimes: A Vindication of Moral Liberty

"30 days hath *September*", Angela, not December...*sigh* Yeah, it's gonna be a great year.

Welcome back!

Happy reading in 2013!

You too!

1/106: Finished Kings 1 of the Bible.

2/106: My first Started but Unfinished, one of the GGBC reads from last year.

Finished the 31 days of libertarian reading a couple days behind, and I started my first Shakespeare read of the year (Richard II).

3/106: My first libertarian challenge book.

Blah. I'm stuck in a rut. I read constantly, but it's all online stuff, or re-reads. I did recently subscribe to The Woman in White this week, through Daily Lit. That's one I can cross off the 1000 Books list.

4/106: Finally read a GGBC choice, Paper Towns, which I recommend.

5/106: Finished Kings 2

6/106: Finished Chronicles 1.

7/106: Finished Chronicles 2. Also, I'm in the middle of Home Education, volume one of Charlotte Mason's education series (category 6); The Woman in White (category 8); and started Richard II and Man vs. the Welfare State (categories 1 and 13). Progress is slow, but steady...

8/106: Finished Ezra.

9/106: Finally finished The Woman in White, my first 1000 Books Before You Die category. Many thanks to DailyLit.com for making this possible.

got over your rut? :) I have the The Women in White to read this year, looking forward to it.

A little bit! The books of the Bible were all short enough to make me feel like I was accomplishing a lot. Then the plot in Woman in White picked up, and I kept requesting the next day's installment, until I read the whole book in three or four days. I'm going on a roadtrip this weekend, and taking a few books with me, so hopefully I'll add another title or two to the lists here.

Oh, I hope you enjoy Woman in White, I did!

10/106: One of this year's GGBC picks. I also started Beowulf with DailyLit, which will be one of my Started but Unfinished.

11/106: Added my first Time Quintet book. After I finish the two books I have checked out now (one for the GGBC category and the other a free read), I'll get the next book in the series.

I've read A Wrinkle in Time, but can't remember much of it, other than that I enjoyed it. I wasn't aware that it was part of a series. It'll go in the reread queue. :)

12/106: Jaws, another GGBC read.

My parents have had the whole series for my whole life, but for some reason I never read them. I enjoyed my first read, hope you enjoy your reread!

13/106: The second book of the Time Quintet.

14/106: Finished Nehemiah, reading Esther next. Also in the middle of the third Time Quintet book, and started a biography of George Washington.

15/106: Finished Esther. Skipping Job because I read it in college, and going on to Psalms.

16/106: Finished Ecclesiastes. I'm reading Psalms at the same time as I move forward through the other books, as Psalms is so long.

17/106: Finished Song of Solomon.

18-20/106: Completed by Bible challenge, which is the only category I'm going to complete this year.

It is all about the reading and having fun so a completed category is great!