2014 Goals/Mini-Challenges

It's mid-December, which means it's time to think about the 2014 mini-challenges! This group has been pretty quiet lately (other than NielsenGW); hopefully more people will return in the new year.

In past years I've done multiple mini-challenges, but this year I'm going to keep it simple: read one new section from each class. I've got at least one on my TBR shelf for each class, so it's just a matter of reading them.

I'm actually interested in the group/challenge, I just haven't got off my butt to do anything about it. Maybe I should add it to my ever-growing plate for 2014?

>1 lorax: Thanks for starting this thread! It's been a slow reading year for me overall, but hopefully next year will be better. For 2014, I'll set a modest goal of reading books in 12 new classes—and really, I'll be satisfied with 6. Slow and steady...ish.

>2 .Monkey.: I definitely think you should go for it! There's always room for one more challenge, right? :D

I've been adding to my lists but they are edits. I've been moving along but the 100s are hardest. My goals are to have 4 of the hundred divisions in each of the ten classes. Right now I have 5 in 000, 1 in 100, 4 in 200, 8 in 300, 3 in 400, 5 in 500, 4 in 600, 6 in 700, 3 in 800, 6 in 900.

100 seems to be my weakest area. I also don't read much fiction which affects the 800s and what I do read is in the same Deweys. Also read a lot of baseball history and tennis (same number range) along with sampler history.

But I will keep plugging away.

>4 fdholt: heh, we're quite opposite, most of my reading falls in the 800s, haha.

4,5>

About half of my reading is in the 8xx, but probably 99% of that is in either 813 or 823 (fiction originally published in English). So it's one of the areas where I've made the least progress since starting the challenge. I'm jealously guarding a new section in 8xx for next year's mini-challenge.

Heh mine too, natural for a native English speaker (or one who is quite fluent and enjoys genre fic/classics, like my husband, lol), but not all of it is! I'd actually prefer to read more translations than I do, but that's mostly (though not entirely) limited to various classics for me, since my library doesn't have other languages translated to English :|

I'm one who has been largely absent from this group for a while. What I need to do is update my thread with all the new Dewey sections I've read since I last posted here. I guess the most realistic goal I can make right now would be to keep current in my Dewey posting.

I'm well on track for my goal - with three months left in 2014, I've read new sections in nine out of the ten classes, and have a TBR for the remaining one. (It's next on the queue. Well, next on one of the queues, anyway; I have four books in progress at any point.)

And I'm done!

The books I ended up reading for the mini-challenge (counting the first one I read for classes where I read more than one new section this year) were:

020: The Information by James Gleick
174: Doing Nothing by Tom Lutz
220: The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs
388: Uncommon Carriers by John McPhee
487: Riddle of the Labyrinth by Margalit Fox
572: Making of the Fittest by Sean Carroll
612: Gulp by Mary Roach
793: Brainiac by Ken Jennings
801: Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon
959: Freedom from Fear and Other Writings by Aung San Suu Kyi

Congratulations! It's encouraging to see someone making progress. You're inspiring me to update my own list :)

Anyone else set themselves a goal for 2014? How did you do?

total disaster for 2014 - crash and burn!

I planned to read from the 0xx's in Jan, the 1xx's in Feb, the 2xx's in March etc and these were the only ones I actually planned out:

070 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson - (started but did not finish)
158 Advice My Parents Gave Me by Rudolph Costa (completed)
248 A New Kind of Christian: A Tale of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey by Brian D. McLaren - (started but did not finish)
362 The Diving-Bell And The Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby (completed)

Then I lost it!

And these others I managed to stumble upon and completed without even thinking about it:

306 Love You Forever by Robert Munsch (Children)
306 Dear Mom: Thank You For Everything by Bradley Trevor Greive
616 The Untold Story of Kim by Ed Robinson
811 Motion Sickness: A Memoir by David Layton
920 Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield
998 Frozen in Time: An Epic Story of Survival and a Modern Quest for Lost Heroes of World War IIby Mitchell Zuckoff

I am planning the same strategy for 2015 and hopefully will do better!