Wanna Join a Book Club?

Yes Readers,

Today is a day of several posts. And spreadsheets, so many spreadsheets.

I host a book club through Facebook that was born out of the Plagues, Witches and War: The Worlds of Historical Fiction - Coursera group, created many moons ago by people who had taken this excellent MOOC. It is hands down one of the best you can take, particularly if you're an avid reader or history buff.

This year, I stopped hosting discussions in March after my father died. I've only recently decided to restart them, but I needed them to change.

Instead of doing one book a month, we're doing one every six weeks. Hopefully this eliminates the issue of not having enough time to read the selections. I've also gone ahead and chosen all nine books for the year, which helps alleviate stress on my end because the previous method of choosing involved polls and voting and a crap load of effort on my end. I'm keeping the discussion questions, though I may not do quite as many, and I am keeping the I Liked and the I Hated threads, because not every reader is going to love every element of every book, and sometimes people like the unexpected aspects of a novel.

Below are the books, discussion dates, and page counts, and I'd love for anyone to join! I can easily add you to the group on FB, but I'll figure out how to make the discussions work in the blogspace or Litsy.

XoXo
BrainyHeroine

Title	Author	Page Count	Discussion Dates
Tulip Fever	Deborah Moggach	288	Jan. 8-14, 2018
The Hamiton Affair	Elizabeth Cobbs	408	Feb. 19-25, 2018
Whispers of the Moon Moth	Lindsay Jayne Ashford	352	Apr. 2-7, 2018
Before We Were Yours	Lisa Wingate	352	May 14-19, 2018
Butterfly Island	Corina Bomann	446	June 25-30, 2018
The Essex Serpent	Sarah Perry	422	Aug. 6-12, 2018
Lincoln in the Bardo	George Saunders	343	Sept. 17-23, 2018
The Witches of New York	Ami McKay	560	Oct. 29 - Nov. 4, 2018
The Cottingley Secret	Hazel Gaynor	383	Dec. 10-15, 2018

Catching Up and Checking In

Happy President's Day!

And on this celebratory day, (where it should be mandatory that the government give us free cake) I am thrilled to say I've completed my challenge list. No, I haven't completed my challenges, well not all of them at least, but I've finished the list for Popsugar and Read Harder so that I'll stop getting distracted with other books and then hope I can fit them in somewhere. Book distraction is a real thing, and it is a real issue for me. I'm a hopper, so at any given time I'm reading/listening to about four or five books. Truly, this is madness.

Since I've been off the last few days this has been my only goal. Now that I've reached said goal I can go through the process of crossing off the books I've read, updating my Goodreads page (which I suck at on a good day sometimes) and tallying up reading challenges. This will also let me move forward with written reviews of the book, more in-depth blog posts about reading, and hopefully I won't lose my damn mind along the way. February is almost over and I feel that in the shortest month of the year I've truly come up short on my reading goals, mainly due to life and reading distractions.

If you're interested, below is the master list I've come up with. I'm not posting what challenge they fit since I don't want complete and utter spoilers haha, but I think I've come up with a pretty impressive list. (NO REPEATS! That deserves a cake on merit alone!)

XoXo
BrainyHeroine

Title of Book	Author	Page Count
A Moment on the Edge	Elizabeth George	560
Accidental Empress	Alison Pataki	512
All The Bright Places	Jennifer Niven	378
All The Ugly and Wonderful Things	Bryn Greenwood	352
Almost a Woman	Esmeralda Santiago	336
Americanah	Chimamanda Mgozi Adichie	477
Antarctica	Claire Keegan	224
Bad Monkey	Matt Ruff	241
Bear, Otter & The Kid	T.J Klune	350
Behold the Dreamers	Imbolo Mbue	400
Bird Box	Josh Malerman	262
Boy Meets Boy	David Leviathan	226
Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War	Giles Whittell	303
Broken Monsters	Lauren Beukes	464
Caraval	Stephanie Garber	416
Catcher in the Rye	J.D. Salinger	288
City of Light City of Poison	Holly Tucker	336
Count of Monte Cristo (mentioned in Butterfly Garden)	Alexander Dumas	1276
Dark Matter	Blake Crouch	354
Eligible	Curtis Sittenfeld	512
Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr	Nancy Isenberg	560
Frankenstein	Mary Shelley	166
Getting an Academic Job in History	Dana Polanichka	112
Hard Luck: Harvey Haddix and the Greatest Game Ever Lost	Lew Freedman	210
Hidden Figures	Margot Lee Shetterly	373
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents	Julia Alvarez	304
How to fight presidents	Daniel O'Brien	272
I Let You Go	Clare Mackintosh	384
January 1973: Watergate, Roe v. Wade, Vietnam, and the Month that Changed America Forever	James Robenalt	420
Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norell	Susannah Clarke	1006
Julie & Julia	Julie Powell	310
Katherine	Anya Seton	500
Life After Life	Kate Atkinson	531
Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk	Kathleen Rooney	287
Margaret The First	Danielle Dutton	176
Matilda	Roald Dahl	240
Missing, Presumed	Susie Steiner	369
Monstress	Marjorie M. Liu, Sana Takeda, Rus Wooton	202
Moongirl and Devil Dinosaur #1	Brandon Monclare, Amy Reeder, Natacha Bustos (illustrator)	24
My Lady Jane	Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, & Jodi Meadows	512
My Name is Red	Orhan Pamuk & Erdag M. Goknar	417
Norwegian Wood	Haruki Murakami	296
Orange is the New Black	Piper Kerman	298
Passengar/Wayfarer	Alexandra Bracken	1018
Personal History	Katherine Grahm	642
Pleasantville	Attica Locke	433
Queen of the Night	Alexander Chee	576
Ready Player One	Ernest Cline	374
Rebecca	Daphne du Maurier	393
Rise of the Rocket Girls	Nathalia Holt	352
Saffron Skies	Lesley Loko	613
Seven Skeletons: The Evolution of the World's Most Famous Human Fossils	Lynda Pryne	288
Sisi: Empress On Her Own	Alison Pataki	464
Sisters In Law	Linda Hirshman	390
Swing Time	Zadie Smith	453
Tales of a Severed Head	Rachida Madani, Marilyn Hacker	176
The 19th Wife	David Ebershoff	530
The Bear and the Nightegale	Katherine Arden	336
The Book Jumper	Mechthild Glaser	384
The Case of Jack the Nipper	H.L. Stephens	328
The Couple Next Door	Shari Lapena	313
The Eyre Affair: Thursday Next #1	Jasper Fforde	374
The Geek Feminist Revolution	Kameron Hurley	288
The Ghost Bride	Yangsze Choo	368
The Girls	Emma Cline	368
The Great Gatsby	F. Scott Fitzgerald	156
The History of Wolves	Emily Fridlund	288
The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared	Jonas Jonasson & Rod Bradbury	396
The Inheritance Trilogy	N. K. Jemsin	1453
The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution	Walter Issacson	528
The Invisible Man	Ralph Ellison	610
The Last Lecture	Randy Pausch & Jeffrey Zaslow	206
The Lonely Hearts Hotel	Heather O'Neill	400
The Lost Sisterhood	Anne Fortier	608
The Luckiest Girl Alive	Jessica Knoll	352
The Mercer Girls	Libbie Hawker	430
The Mermaids Daughter	Ann Claycomb	448
The Miniaturist	Jessie Burton	416
The Mists of Avalon	Marion Zimmer Bradley	1737
The Muse	Jessie Burton	416
The Nest	Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney	368
The Ocean at the End of the Lane	Neil Gaiman	256
The Possessions	Sarah Flannery Murphy	368
The Private Letters of Countess Erzesbet Bathory	Kimberly Craft	142
The Rooms	Lauren Oliver	320
The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific	J. Maarten Troost	272
The Shining Girls	Lauren Beukes	375
The Silent WIfe	A.S.A Harrison	326
The Star Touched Queen	Roshani Chokshi	342
THe Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet	David Mitchell	479
The Trespasser	Tana French	449
The Unraveling of Mercy Louis	Keija Parssinen	336
The Verdict	Nick Stone	512
The Virgin Cure	Ami McKay	356
Tulip Fever	Deborah Moggach	288
Under Different Stars	Amy A Bartol	297
Underground Railroad	Colson Whitehead	306
Vlad the Impaler: The Real Count Dracula	Enid A. Goldber & Norman Itzkowitz	128
What She Knew	Gilly McMillian	699
Xanadu	John Man	352
You Will Know Me	Meg Abbot	352
Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald	Therese Anne Fowler	384

Decisions, Decisions

Happy New Year All!

To kick off this new year I am doing a book reading blitz. Between today and tomorrow I plan to read as many challenge books as I can! There are about 10 on my master list that are nice and short, unintentionally, yet this is making my blitz that much more doable.

The blitz had been planned for awhile, but the books kept bouncing around. Actually deciding what to read sometimes is hard! I am one of those who can simultaneously want to read any and everything, while still not being able find anything to read.

For the blitz I have chosen the shorter books on my list which will let me start off with a bang. Over the next couple of days I'm aiming to get through about 8 books; each meeting a different challenge requirement.

Am I insane? Yes. But this will also be great practice for the 24in48 January Read-a-thon later this month. (Check it out and sign up!)

Happy Reading!
-BrainyHeroine

Books and Math

Good Afternoon All,

One thing that I have always loved about books is that they are decidedly un-mathy, unless you're reading a book about math. Since I was never very good at math, numbers and I just don't get along. However it occurred to me that these reading challenges are going to be a numbers game. By the end of next year I will have (hopefully) read between 84 and 108 books; 26 from the #LitsyAtoZ challenge + 40 from PopSugar's 2017 Challenge + 12 additional PS challenge books + 12 books for my Historical Fiction book club + 12 Book of the Month Club books + 6 to make the total nicely divisible by 12. All said and done it is 108 books, the minimum to meet the challenges will be 84. I'm still presuming that there will be some cross over as 9 books in a month is quite a bit. Though, when you factor that some of these books will be in audiobook format it seems more plausible somehow. I'm excited for this undertaking. I've bought a second book log to keep track of EVERYTHING I read and listen too next year, whilst keeping my TARDIS log for the challenges.

The more thought and preparation I'm putting into my Lit Goals for 2017 the more excited and nervous I'm getting. Help me along, won't you? Tell me what your favorite book is, or one you think would fit any of these challenges, or one that makes you happy, one that you think the world should read; I'd really love to know.

All the best,
Brainy Heroine

#LitsyAtoZ Book List

Below are the books I've decided to use for this challenge. I've posted title, author and page count. All said and done it is 26 books and a whopping 10,654 pages! 

Title of Book	Author	Page Count
All The Ugly and Wonderful Things	Bryn Greenwood	352
Behold the Dreamers	Imbolo Mbue	400
The Couple Next Door	Shari Lapena	313
Dark Matter	Blake Crouch	354
Eligible	Curtis Sittenfeld	512
Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr	Nancy Isenberg	560
The Geek Feminist Revolution	Kameron Hurley	288
Hidden Figures	Margot Lee Shetterly	373
I Let You Go	Clare Mackintosh	384
January 1973: Watergate, Roe v. Wade, Vietnam, and the Month that Changed America Forever	James Robenalt	420
Katherine	Anya Seton	500
The Lost Sisterhood	Anne Fortier	608
Missing, Presumed	Susie Steiner	369
The Nest	Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney	368
The Ocean at the End of the Lane	Neil Gaiman	256
Pleasantville	Attica Locke	433
Queen of the Night	Alexander Chee	576
Rise of the Rocket Girls	Nathalia Holt	352
Seven Skeletons: The Evolution of the World's Most Famous Human Fossils	Lynda Pryne	288
The Trespasser	Tana French	464
The Unraveling of Mercy Louis	Keija Parssinen	336
The Verdict	Nick Stone	512
What She Knew	Gilly McMillian	699
Xanadu	John Man	352
You Will Know Me	Meg Abbot	352
Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald	Therese Ann Fowler	375
		10,796

The PopSugar 2017 Reading Challenge List

For those of you wanting to do this one yourself, I'd recomend reading the fantastic article about it first over on PopSugar! For those of you familiar with the challenge, or want a copy of the list to follow along with, then here you go!

The List

• A book recommended by a librarian (school, public, etc)
• A book that's been on your TBR list for way to long
• A book of letters 
• An audiobook
• A book by a person of color
• A book with one of the four seasons in the title
• A book that is a story within a story
• A book with multiple authors
• An espionage thriller
• A book with a cat on the cover
• A book by an author who uses a pseudonym
• A best seller from a genre you don't normally read
• A book by or about a person who has a disability
• A book involving travel
• A book with a subtitle 
• A book that's published in 2017
• A book involving a mythical creature
• A book you've read before that never fails to make you smile
• A book about food
• A book with career advice
• A book from a nonhuman perspective
• A steampunk novel
• A book with a red spine
• A book set in the wilderness
• A book you loved as a child
• A book by an author from a country you've never visited
• A book with a title that's a character's name
• A novel set during wartime 
• A book with an unreliable narrator
• A book with pictures
• A book where the main character is a different ethnicity than you
• A book about an interesting woman
• A book set in two different time periods
• A book with a month or day of the week in the title 
• A book set in a hotel
• A book written by someone you admire
• A book that's becoming a movie in 2017
• A book set around a holiday other than Christmas
• The first book in a series you haven't read before
• A book you bought on a trip

Advanced (12 bonus books!)

• A book recommended by an author you love
• A bestseller from 2016
• A book with a family- member term in the title
• A book that takes place over a character's life span
• A book about an immigrant or refugee 
• A book from a genre/subgenre that you've never heard of
• A book with an eccentric character
• A book that's more than 800 pages
• A book you got from a used book sale
• A book that's been mentioned in another book
• A book about a difficult topic
• A book based on mythology

Challenge(s) Accepted

Hello there,

You seem to have stumbled across my book blog, either by accident or by following a link from somewhere. Thank you for stopping in! I'm so excited to share Lit Goals with you and to blather on about #LitGoals2017. This is all such a passion project, something that will be fun, make a great log of the books I've read in 2017, and the place to track my progress for the reading challenges I've accepted. Last year I accepted two reading challenges and had them both finished by March, I added a third and was done with it by August. I am an avid reader and listener of audiobooks. Yes! AUDIOBOOKS COUNT AS BOOKS. Some may disagree however and they are allowed too. I am so thrilled to explain this coming year's challenges and I encourage you to participate in them! They'll be great fun and sometimes you just need that extra motivation to read a book.

Oh, you're probably wondering who I am. That's an easy one. I'm Ami Rebecca, a native to Las Vegas, NV. I graduated from Nevada State College in 2015 with a BA in History and a concentration in Pre-Law. I'm married to my amazing husband who is currently in a Ph.D. program at UNLV for Radiochemistry. (He wants to save the planet.) Presently I am not in school, but have goals to obtain my masters and Ph.D. in History, focusing on the Habsburg Monarchy, Medieval Spain and Hungary, and Erzsebet Bathory. When they said find a niche I took them quite literally. I don't have kids, but I do have a cat, and during the day I work for a law firm helping the disabled. Reading has always been a passion of mine. I was that kid who got in trouble for it, always did the reading for class, and knew every librarian by name. There is something soothing about books, the way that you can find the one you need, the way they find you, they're truly magical. Many of those historic moments in my life, many of those big decisions can be traced directly back to the books I've read.

As an avid reader I've accepted many book challenges over the past few years. There is only one I didn't finish, but that was because the book was creepy and giving me nightmares. I'll get back to it someday. The particular book challenges I'm following in 2017 are simple. The first is the #LitsyAtoZ challenge created by fellow Litsian BookishMarginalia (if you Litsy, follow her and join the challenge! If you're on Litsy follow me too! BrainyHeroine). The rules are simple, she had three veins you could choose from, either alphabetically read books by author's last name, book title, or both. I've chosen to go the route of A to Z book titles. I'm looking forward to branching out and reading more non-fiction and even reading fiction books I normally wouldn't think twice about. Challenges are about expanding ones horizons after all.

The second challenge that I'm doing is one I've done before, it is the PopSugar 2017 challenge. The rules for this one are simpler, just read one of everything on the list. For those who are quick readers they even have an additional 12 items! That would equate to one book a week, but there are people who can do it. 

The last challenge I'm doing is the Goodreads Shelf Challenge, an easy peasy numbers game. I'm going to tell Goodreads a number of books I plan to read, and then by the end of the year I should hopefully have read that many. The challenge there is remembering to log them in, and as a bonus challenge to myself I'm going to start reviewing the books I've marked as "Read."

It is going to be an exciting year of reading, and yes there will be some cross over between challenges, there isn't any rule saying that there can't be. If you're curious about the #LitsyAtoZ books I'll be reading fear not, a list is posted (right under the header, you can't miss it; once I read a book I'll delete it from the list) and you can search the Card Catalog on the side bar for #LitsyAtoZ. posts and book posts. I'll also be posting my Book of the Month Club choices, my Audible of the month choice, and what I'm currently reading, letting you all stay in the loop! (Side note, if you'd like to stay in the loop even faster you can submit your email address in the side bar and get an alert with each posting!) You can also follow my Litstagram on Instagram and my Goodreads page as well.

Have any questions? Want a review of a book? Want me to read and review your book? Email me at literaturegoals@gmail.com and I'll be more than happy to strike up a conversation about books!

Happy Reading!