I've been successfully resisting participation in reading challenges all year, feeling that I needed a bit of respite after getting carried away with them in previous years and thereby transforming my pleasure reading into a source of stress. But Booking Mama's Shelf Discovery Challenge dovetails so nicely with my current project of revisiting the books that mattered most to me in childhood that there's no way I'm going to pass this one up! The challenge simply involves choosing six of the books featured in Lizzie Skurnick's Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading, and reading and posting about them between November 1, 2009 and April 30, 2010. Here are my choices:
Judy Blume, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret;
Louise Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy;
E.L. Konigsburg, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler;
Beverly Cleary, Fifteen;
Bette Greene, Summer of My German Solider; and,
Elizabeth George Speare, The Witch of Blackbird Pond.
I'm looking forward to revisiting each of these books, and to comparing notes on the experience with other participants in the challenge.