The Rules:
This challenge will run from April 1, 2008 to March 31, 2009. All you have to do is select six cookbooks to read* and make at least one of the recipes. These can be any cookbooks of your choice - brand new ones, old stand-bys that you can't live (or cook) without, or even heirlooms. You do not have to decide on the cookbooks ahead of time (unless you want to, of course). Then post your reviews either here or on your own blog. If you want, you can even post pictures of your creations along with your reviews!
Leave a comment at Ex Libris if you want to join! Let's find some good eats!
Last month I decided to challenge myself by reading at least one book a month that was outside of my normal reading genres. To help myself pick books, I set up the birthday challenge (link), in which I read a book by an author is having a birthday in that particular month. In February, the author was Michael Shaara and the book Gods and Generals.
Gods and Generals is a book that follows four leaders of the Civil War, looking at their lives and careers in the years leading to and the first 2 years (approximately) of the war. While the characters in the story are pulled from history (General Robert E. Lee, General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, General Winfield Scott Hancock, and Lieutenant Colonel Joshua Chamberlain), it is fiction in that the author delves more into the characters than history records. If you’re looking for an accurate history book with very detailed information about battles, then this isn’t the book for you. While Shaara does give ample information about troop movements and battles, he spends more time exploring the characters, their motivations for fighting, their family lives, and their relationships with the other soldiers.
I’m a history buff and particularly enjoy learning about the Civil War. So, I really enjoyed this book. As I read I had a strong urge to watch the movie Gettysburg, which was based on his father, Michael Shaara’s book The Killer Angels, to get the rest of the story.
So, Jessica has been doing a lot of blog surfing to find ways of expanding our reading horizon's and to make this blog of ours better. One thing that she ran across was that a lot of bloggers do reading challenges. I found this to be an interesting concept. The one challenge that really intrigued me was the birthday challenge. The idea is for each month to pick an author born in that month and read at least one of their books. So, at the end of the year, you'd have 12 authors. But the problem with that particular challenge is that the lady running it closed sign-ups in January. But I thought I might participate unofficially and I would run from Feb 2008 to Jan 2009.
So, using the website Author Birthday/Web Directory these are the authors I have chosen to highlight in the challenge. I am picking authors I haven't read before and am trying hard to pick from genres that I don't normally read.
February 2008- Jeff Shaara
March- Louis L'Amour
April- Tom Clancy
May- Robert Ludlum
June- Marion Zimmer Bradley
July- Erle Stanley Gardner
August- Orson Scott Card
September- F. Scott Fitzgerald
October- J.D. Robb
November- Dale Brown
December- Patricia Gaffney
January 2009- Jack London
I of course, reserve the right to change my choices and will update this list accordingly. I'll also use the graphic on this post each time I post a review that is related to this challenge. I enourage others to try this challenge. Read books out of your comfort zone (notice I didn't pick any romance authors... well, J.D. Robb doesn't count and I'm leaning more toward Anne Rice anyway). Post here if you'll read along with me and I'd love to hear some words of encouragement. And by the way, I just put a request on Gods and Generals