Weekly Geeks #9

Last weeks Weekly Geeks was a blog scavenger hunt, which seemed really cool, but I just didn’t have the energy to put the time it required. I think I used that excuse for missing Weekly Geeks #6 too… Anyway, I’m really impressed with the bloggers that did it and got a lot of posts, that takes dedication! This week, week #9 of the Weekly Geek challenge (courtesy of Dewey at The Hidden Side of a Leaf) is all about challenges. Dewey suggests doing three different things as part of the Weekly Geek Challenge:

1. If you participate in any challenges, get organized!

2. If you don’t participate in any challenges, then join one!

3. Towards the end of the week, write a wrap-up post about getting your challenges organized OR if you’re joining your first challenge, post about that any time during the week.

Right now, the only official challenge I participate in is Weekly Geeks, so I decided to write about the unofficial challenges I am working on and look for another challenge to be a part of.

My Informal Challenge

One of my best English major friends from college, Amanda, recently moved to San Francisco. In order to stay connected, we decided to start a book project. Each month or so, we’re going to pick a topic and a selection of books related to that topic. We’ll both read the books, and then talk about them as we feel like it. It’s pretty informal, but a nice way to keep something to talk about (along with all of the marvelous life experiences she is having in the big city). Our first month’s topic was pop culture, and we’re working on five books:

1. Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Johnson
2. Sex, Drugs, and Coco Puffs by Chuck Klosterman
3. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body by Susan Bordo
4. In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan
5. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins

It’s getting to the end of June already, and I’ve only gotten through Everything Bad and Convergence Culture so far, but I really enjoyed both of them. I still haven’t written the reviews for them, so maybe that will be the second part of my Weekly Geek project this week. We also certainly welcome other people to join our project — our next few topic ideas include feminist books, post-modern books, travel writing, world literature, and modern fairy tales/mythology.

My New Challenge

For my new challenge, I’ve decided to try something by another newish blogger, Rebecca Reads. She has created the HTR&W Challenge, which is a reading list based on the the book How To Read & Why by Harold Bloom. The list includes a number of short stories, poems, plays, and novels, which I think will be a nice mixture for a project. I also like the idea behind it — to get back to ingesting and really understanding books rather than just reading them to get through (a habit I got into at the end of my undergrad career when I was getting drained with college). My first challenge for the project is going to be to get that book, and then I’ll know what order my reading list is going in. I again don’t really have a timeline for this, but it’s a start!

That takes care of the first and second tasks, so I’ll just have to do a wrap up of things at the end of this week, hopefully with links to reviews of my finished book project books.