Roof Beam Reader 2019 TBR Challenge Signup

Adam at Roof Beam Reader hosts a TBR challenge. I'm signing up this year for the first time. It's a dozen books (plus two alternates) and requires you to specify in advance the books you're going to read. Tricky! At least for me. My reading habits usually amount to "Ooh...shiny!" and off I go in some new direction. Head off to his announcement post for full details.

There are lots of books around here to choose from; it's the choosing that's hard. To help out I decided on some categories before I even started. Here's the list:

Contemporary fiction. I see a review of something and think that sounds fun! Now is the time to find out if I was right:

1.) Eleanor Catton/The Luminaries
2.) Marisha Pessl/Special Topics in Calamity Physics
3.) Xialou Guo/A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

Poetry. Poetry volumes are often slim and those get read right away. But if they aren't and they don't...

4.) John Hollander/Spectral Emanations: New and Selected Poems
5.) Brad Leithauser/Darlington's Fall
6.) Anne Sexton/The Complete Poems

New York Review Book reissues. I've had such ridiculous good luck with their reissues, I can't resist something new and unknown when it shows up at my remaindered book store. But sometimes they slip into the pile. Time to catch up on those!

7.) Eileen Chang/Love In A Fallen City
8.) Dorothy Baker/Young Man With A Horn
9.) Christopher Priest/Inverted World

Detective Stories. How is it I even have crime novels aged for over a year on my TBR pile? I'm not sure, but not for much longer...

10.) Michael Bond/Monsieur Pamplemousse Omnibus, Vol. 1
11.) Sparkle Hayter/The Last Manly Man
12.) Ngaio Marsh/Overture to Death

And for my two alternates. Two readable choices from my Classics Club list.

1.) George Bernard Shaw/Pygmalion
2.) Jules Verne/Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea

Thanks to Adam for hosting!