Summer Reading Challenge

Our library is doing an adult summer reading program during the month of July.  There are nine prompts to choose from and as you finish one you submit an entry that will put you in drawings for prizes. There are small drawings every week and then a big one on July 31st.  You can only enter and entry for each prompt once. I thought this would be a good way for me to branch out a little bit, plus I like prizes.   Here are the prompts: 1. Reread a book you loved as a child. 2. Tackle the classic you "cliff-noted" in high school. 3. Discover a book of poetry and read some aloud. 4. Read a book written the year you were born. 5. Hoosier connection: read something about Bloomington or Indiana or by a Hoosier author. 6. Choose an author or the setting of a book that is foreign to you. 7. Play opposite day: Try nonfiction if you usually choose fiction or vice versa. 8. Spend an aimless hour exploring the Main Library, Ellettsville Library or Bookmobile or wandering the website. And/or ask a librarian to show you a reader's advisory database. 9. Find a book about an exercise or diet you have never tried and try it. (gluten free? tex-mex? yoga? chair exercises?) Here are the ones I've done so far: 1. Reread a book you loved as a child. The Boxcar Children  by Gertrude Chandler Warner I loved this book, and the rest of the series, when I was younger.  There was just something about it that would fire up my imagination; it was the ultimate way to play house.  Sometimes I would pretend our bunk bed was a boxcar that I was living in.  It was fun to read it again and remember how much I loved it when I was younger. 6. Choose an author or the setting of a book that is foreign to you. Sofia Petrovna by Lydia Chukovskaya This is a story based on the experiences of the author and her friends and family during the Great Purge in Russia during the late 1930s.  Sofia Petrovna works in a publishing house as a typist when various acquaintances and other workers disapear and are accused to being traitors to the Communist party.  Sofia's son is taken and she spends her days standing in long lines at the prosecutors office hoping to hear any news of him.  It was fascinating and heartbreaking to read what kind of experiences people in the Soviet Union went through, all the uncertainty when what you believed in all the sudden doesn't make any sense and takes your family away.