My OcTBR Reading Challenge

By Shala Howell, October 9, 2020

Eighty-seven years ago, I decided that my resolution for 2020 would be to deal with all those books on my Currently Reading pile. At the time, I had 45 books that I had started and set aside for some day when I was more in the mood. They weren’t bad books. They just weren’t the right book for me at that time.

Since then I’ve gotten that list down to about 28 books, which is not bad. But I’ve still got a long way to go if I’m going to meet my 2020 resolution.

Turns out, thanks to the good folks over at The OcTBR Challenge, there’s a fall reading challenge just for people like me, who have towering To-Read piles that they want to eradicate before the end of the year.

My OcTBR Reading Challenge

One of the great things about having an excessively long TBR list is that it’s not hard to find a lot of great books to read. Here’s my tentative list for this year’s OcTBR Challenge.

My OcTBR Reading Challenge – Fiction

In case you can’t read all those titles, my fiction list includes:

• Amal Unbound by Aisha Saeed
• Strange Birds by Celia C. Pérez
• More to the Story by Hena Khan
• A Moose Boosh: A Few Choice Words About Food by Eric-Shabazz Larkin
• Allies by Alan Gratz
• Thin Wood Walls by David Patneaude
• Necessity by Jo Walton
• A Ghostly Request by Krista D. Ball
• The Secret Chapter by Genevieve Cogman
• Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas
• The Magicians by Lev Grossman
• A Mango-Shaped Space by Wendy Mass

I can hear what you’re thinking: “That’s a lot of books, Shala. Those expectations don’t seem very realistic.”

First, I completely agree. Second, at least half of them are middle-grade novels, which I can usually finish in an afternoon. Third, you don’t know the half of it.

My OcTBR Challenge list also includes non-fiction

Still, since I can’t spend the entire month sitting in a chair, my nonfiction list largely consists of podcasts and audiobooks, which I can listen to while working on other things. It includes:

• So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo
• The Emotional Craft of Fiction by Donald Maass
• How to Outline a Cozy Mystery by Sara Rosetti
• The Terrible Lizards podcast, which is all about dinosaurs, so basically my favorite podcast of all time
• The History Extra podcast, which has a don’t miss episode on how eels became a fundamental part of the English identity in the Middle Ages
• The 1619 podcast, because I definitely didn’t learn everything I needed to know about America’s history in school

Will I get through it all?

Probably not. But that’s ok. I’ll get through a fair amount, which will leave me a mere dozen or so books to plow through before the end of the year. (Assuming a miracle happens and I don’t get distracted by the next shiny book to walk through our front door.)

What about you?

What are you doing to distract yourself this October?

Related Links:

• Reading Goals 2020 (Caterpickles)
• OcTBR Challenge: Time to Take on Those TBR Towers

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