Color Coded Reading Challenge 2024 - My Wrap-Up

There's just something so charming about reading by color. This was my 9th year of participation and it is just as fun as ever. 

I have to bend the rules a little bit to identify the "implies color" book, because I choose these books from my TBR pile, but so what? I will never be desperate enough to read "Gravity's Rainbow."  

Here's how it went:

1. Blue: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - Michael Chabon (Pulitzer Prize) 

2. Red: Milkman - Anna Burns (Booker Prize) 

3. Yellow: The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho 

4. Green: The Night Watchman - Louise Erdrich (Pulitzer Prize)

5. Brown: Half Wild - Robin MacArthur 

6. Black: Please Look After Mom - Kyung-Sook Shin (Asian Literary Prize) 

7. White: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz (Pulitzer Prize) 

8. Another color (orange): The Orphan Master's Son - Adam Johnson (Pulitzer Prize) Substitute: Let Us Descend - Jesmyn Ward 

9. Implies color: The Stone Diaries - Carol Shields (Pulitzer Prize) (stone is a noun here, but also a color, okay?) 

Reviews can be found here or under the Reviews tab.

This was a really good year for reading that kept me coming back to the page, engaged and interested in what would happen next. I bailed out on the first orange book because of the subject matter (I was not ready to read about violent interrogation techniques in North Korea), but thanks to the others I traveled from the creative world of comic books and a fable of treasure-seeking to the claustrophobic world of civil war, from middle/lower class American white culture to Korean culture, and from Southern slavery to Native American culture to the contemporary immigrant experience. It was quite a ride!