Canadian Book Challenge #5

Happy Canada Day! It's July 1st again and that means Canada Day celebrations and The Canadian Book Challenge 5. I signed up for Challenge 4 and my goal was to read 13 but I managed to get in these 16:

The Wise and Foolish Virgins by Don Hannah
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Blue Castle by Lucy M. Montgomery
The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway
The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill
The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence
Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowatt
The Hatbox Letters by Beth Powning
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz by Mordecai Richler
The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Towes
The Piano Man's Daughter by Timothy Findlay
Glass Voices by Carol Bruneau
Anne of Green Gables by Lucy M. Montgomery
The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor by Sally Armstrong
The Boat Who Wouldn't Float by Farley Mowatt

The challenge was a very positive experience for me, discovering Canadian authours whose names I'd never heard and finally getting to some whose names are as familiar to me as my own but whose books I just never got around to picking up. I found writers I loved and writers I didn't enjoy at all, but I ended the challenge feeling like I have a whole new world of unexplored books waiting for me.

For my first year in the challenge I made a list of Canadian books I've been wanting to read but this time around I think I'll just read them as I find them. There's a huge list of them at Canadian Book Challenge 4 Final Roundup. John Mutford hosts the Canadian Book Challenge on his blog www.bookmineset.blogspot.com and keeps a running tally month by month of the total each participant has read. The link above will take you to the list of the 859 reviews written on 638 books by 56 participants in the past year.

I just signed up for Challenge #5 and hope some of you will consider it. All you have to do is send John an email at jmutford (at) hotmail [dot] com with "sign me up" in the subject line. Each month he sends out an email asking us to send links to the reviews of books we've read that month and once he gets your first one you'll be added to the list of participants in his sidebar.

You don't have to have a website or blog to post a review. Places like Amazon and Chapters let anyone post a review without having to sign in. The only stipulation John has is that the reviews be available to everyone, so posting it on Facebook wouldn't qualify because you have to have an account to sign in.

So click on the Canadian Book Challenge 5 button on my sidebar and check it out. And in the meantime, enjoy your Canada Day celebrations!