Themed Reading Challenge 2010

Caribousmom is hosting the Themed Reading Challenge again this year! It runs February 14 to August 14, 2010, and is designed to help readers clear books from their to-be-read stacks which center around a common theme or themes.

Here's how the rules go:

Readers may join at ANY TIME between now and August 14th.

Books should be chosen from the reader’s TBR pile (this may be an actual physical pile or a virtual pile).

The goal is to read AT LEAST 5 books linked by theme.

Overlaps with other challenges are allowed.

Readers may change their list of books OR their theme(s) at any time.

Readers may choose from three different levels of participation:

Read at least 5 books which share the same theme.

Read at least 5 books which share TWO themes.

Read at least 5 books which share MORE THAN TWO themes.

Themes can be geographic, genre, author, subject matter, or anything in between!

My theme is going to be Linkages: pairs of books in which a quote from one book is used as an epigraph in the other. That should make reviewing easy, as I can focus on the connections between the books.

I would love to string together a whole daisy chain of books linked by epigraphs, but it's proved difficult enough just to come up with these three pairs. Even my towering, teetering TBR pile doesn't yield more than:

1. Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst (note clever overlap with the Bookers here) quotes Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol

2. The Namesake by Jhumpl Lahiri quotes "The Overcoat" by Nikolai Gogol (I'll read all the short stories in that book but concentrate on this one)

3. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann quotes The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon

There is one more pairing that I'm trying so hard to remember, and it's driving me crazy that I can't quite get a grasp on it. All I can remember is that the epigraph refers to The Sun Also Rises, and talks about how a book can be about something without actually being about it. Not much to go on, there. Good thing this challenge allows changes at any time, so I can continue to ponder.