This is one of the challenges of which I am most proud of completing this year.

Like Judith over at Leeswammes’ Blog, who hosted this challenge, I have a wishlist (what book blogger doesn’t?) My wishlist is a virtual pile of books, that I would like to own or at least read. I keep my list on an Excel spreadsheet and add to it faster than I’ll ever be able to read from it: currently it has 2,165 titles on it. (That’s up from 662 a year ago. That will tell you how unrealistic the list is.)

Nonetheless, in order to make a dent in it, I signed up for Judith’s Wishlist Challenge. It required me to read 12 books (one for every month of the year) that I’d like to read, but didn’t already have on my shelves. The title MUST have been on my wish list before January 1, 2012, so I decided to commit to 12 titles last January. And, as a bonus to myself, all of the titles (but one) are fiction and all are by Canadian authors.

I read eleven of the originally listed twelve, replacing one title with another qualifying one, so I count this as a huge

SUCCESS!

especially given my self-imposed Canadian-content rule.

1. Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyen

2. The Calling by Inger Ash Wolfe

3. The Colony of Unrequited Dreams by Wayne Johnston

4. A Recipe for Bees by Gail Anderson-Dergatz

5. Practical Jean by Trevor Cole

6. Twenty-Six by Leo McKay, Jr.

7. The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt

8. The Beggar’s Garden by Michael Christie

9. The Birth House by Ami McKay

10. Mr. Sandman by Barbara Gowdy (read Dec 2012)

11. Joyner’s Dream by Sylvia Tyson The Underpainter by Jane Urquhart (read Dec 2012)

12. Mordecai: His Life and Times by Charles Foran (in progress)

* * * * *

The Bucket List Challenge, hosted by Jamie over at The Eclectic Bookshelf, while sounding somewhat similar (to read a list of books that I’ve wanted to read – most for years – but haven’t gotten around to) was different in that I composed this list my own TBR stacks, aligning it more with my TBR Challenges than with the Wishlist Challenge (above).

Like most of my TBR challenges, this one also ended in

FAILURE!

I entered at the “Mid-Sized Sedan” level of only 8 books but hubris led me to think that I could make three of those 8 chunksters. I did finish A Suitable Boy which is one of the longest novels in the English language, but fell short with the two other monsters noted below.

1. Walden by Henry David Thoreau

2. A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth

3. The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz by Mordecai Richler

4. Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck

5. How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn

6. Memoirs by Pierre Elliott Trudeau

7. London by Edward Rutherford

8. Collected Stories by Carol Shields