Saturday, June 15, 2024

This Season’s Reading Challenge



On Bluesky, where I have been spending much of my online time, I recently began taking part in a collective social-media activity: posting the covers of twenty books that “greatly influenced” me over the course of my life. The Challenge (as it were) asks participants to post their selections without comment, presumably to make our postings resonate more with people who share the same selections. As I suspect that relatively few of my blog readers frequent Bluesky, I offer below the complete list, with some added links and comments:


The Cave of Time, by Edward Packard

The 79 Squares, by Malcolm Bosse

Bridge to Terabithia, by Katherine Patterson

The Sword of the Spirits, by John Christopher

The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula Leguin

Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut

1066: The Year of the Conquest, by David Hogarth

Silas Marner, by George Eliot

The Peopling of British North America, by Bernard Bailyn

Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, by Immanuel Kant

The Worst Years of Our Lives, by Barbara Ehrenreich

The Road to Wigan Pier, by George Orwell

Sandman: A Game of You, by Neil Gaiman

The Age of Federalism, by Stanley Elkins and Eric McKittrick

A Spirited Resistance, by Gregory Dowd

Them Bones, by Howard Waldrop

Cherokee Women, by Theda Perdue

Debt: The First 5,000 Years, by David Graeber

Saga: Vol. 3 by Brian Vaughan and Fiona Staples

The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow 


I have reviewed some of these works here and on my other blog, the Ramshackle Vampire, in years past. Of the others I plan to say a few words in subsequent posts here at STHH.