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For those of you who enjoy our monthly themes,here is the list for 2015.

JAN: Read that classic you always wanted to read, but never got around too.
FEB: Black Authors (for Black History Month)
MAR: Women Authors (for Women’s History Month)
APR: Books Made Into Movies
MAY: Books about a Journey (Gulliver’s Travels, Odyssey, Murder on the Orient Express, Divine Comedy)
JUNE: Science Fiction/Fantasy
JULY: Canadian Authors
AUG: Diary or Letters (Anne Frank, Frankenstein)
SEPT: Banned or Challenged Books (for Banned Books Week)
OCT: Terror, Horror, Suspense
NOV: Spanish / Hispanic Authors
DEC: Short Stories

YES! I love your monthly themes! Thanks

Monthly themes are now located in the message above.

One of our more popular themes from last year is back for February's Black History Month.

Fiction
Chinua Achebe � Things Fall Apart
Alice Walker � The Color Purple
Ralph Ellison � Invisible Man
James Baldwin � Go Tell It On the Mountain
Zora Neale Hurston � Their Eyes Were Watching God
Richard Wright � Native Son
Toni Morrison � Beloved
Octavia Butler � Kindred
Samuel Ray Delaney, Jr. - Babel-17

Non-Fiction
W.E.B. Du Bois -- Souls of Black Folk
Booker T. Washington � Up From Slavery
Frederick Douglass � Narrative of the Life Of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
Richard Wright � Black Boy
Alex Haley � Roots
The Autobiography of Malcolm X (w/Alex Haley)
Why We Can’t Wait � Martin Luther King, Jr.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings � Maya Angelou

Drama/Poetry
August Wilson � Fences
Lorraine Hansberry � A Raisin in the Sun
Langston Hughes � Collected Poems
James Weldon Johnson � The Book of American Negro Poetry
Claude McKay � Complete Poems
Sterling Brown � Collected Poems
Phyllis Wheatley � Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral

Websites for more suggestions and reading ideas:
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Got more suggestions? Leave them in the comments below.

March's Theme is Women Authors for Women's History Month. Recycling last year's list because of limited time. Got a good book or author suggestion or recommendation for Women's History Month? Add it in the comments.

Suggested Reading for March
Women’s History Month

Pre-1700
� Sappho
� St. Hildegard of Bingen
� St. Catherine of Siena
� Julian of Norwich
� Margery Kempe
� Juana Ines de la Cruz

18th Century
� Mary Wollstonecraft
� Anna Laetitia Barbauld

19th Century
� Louisa May Alcott
� Kate Chopin
� Emily Dickinson
� Harriet Beecher Stowe
� Jane Austen
� Mary Shelley
� Anne Bronte
� Charlotte Bronte
� Emily Bronte
� George Eliot
� Elizabeth Gaskell

20th Century
� Edith Wharton
� Willa Cather
� Virginia Woolf
� Agatha Christie
� Doris Lessing
� Iris Murdoch
� Zora Neale Hurston
� Sylvia Plath
� Katherine Anne Porter
� S. E. Hinton
� Margaret Mitchell
� Laura Ingalls Wilder
� Harper Lee
� Pearl S. Buck
� Ayn Rand
� Carson McCullers
� Flannery O’Connor
� Toni Morrison
� Maya Angelou
� Octavia Butler
� Ursula K. Le Guin
� Anne Tyler
� Joyce Carol Oates
� Joan Didion
� Marion Zimmer Bradley
� Amy Tan
� Madeline L’Engle
� Sandra Cisneros
� Margaret Atwood

Various “Best Of� Lists around the Internet:


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Contributions of women to pre-modern Asian literature included here:

April's Theme: Classics adapted into movies!

From Dave: "Some nice person on IMDB put together a list of classics adapted to film and/or TV. This is probably as good a place as any to start our April theme.

Coming to theaters in 2015: Frankenstein (again), and Far From the Madding Crowd.

Feel free to suggest more. Even better, make April your chance to read the book one of your favorite movies in based on. (Count of Monte Cristo, anybody?)

IMDB 50 Classics:


Here is another list:

May Theme: Books about a Journey

Hi folks, it's May, the time where we start thinking about where we want to go, what we want to do, and, most importantly, what we're going to read for the summer! This month we designated "Books About A Journey" as our theme. As you will see from the sample list below, a journey can take many forms.

Homer: The Odyssey
Virgil: The Aeneid
Dante: The Divine Comedy
Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote
Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels
Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness
Jack London: The Call of the Wild
Agatha Christie: Murder on the Orient Express
J.R.R. Tolkien: The Hobbit
Jack Kerouac: On The Road
C.S. Lewis: Voyage of the Dawn Treader
Hermann Hesse: Siddhartha
Robert Pirsig: Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Antonie de Saint-Exupery: The Little Prince
Hunter S. Thompson: Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas

When searching for lists, I found using the term "quest" helpful, but use care when using "travel". Half the time it took me to lists of beach reads, or books that are good to read if you are traveling to a certain place, though there isn't much of a journey in the book itself.

June Theme: Science Fiction & Fantasy

June has the honor of being the month that is a favorite among your moderators (well, two of them for sure) - Science Fiction & Fantasy classics. Although there are a few titles that can be retroactively considered science fiction (Frankenstein), the genre is fairly young and most of the classic literature is firmly in the 20th century. To whet your appetite, here are some attractive lists of the Masterworks series for Science Fiction and Fantasy. The series are compiled by Orion, a British publisher, so there is some slant toward what may have been a bigger deal in the UK. For example, I didn't know who Olaf Stapleton was.

SF Masterworks:


Fantasy Masterworks:
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For the super-fans, check out their Gateway series, an extensive collection of more obscure classics:
(No fancy covers here!)

July Theme: Canadian Literature

Happy July everyone! Although I've completed all my traveling for the season last month, my brain was on vacation until now and I am only now getting our theme for the month broadcasted.

First, a bit of advice. Do not Google "Canadian classics" unless you want to learn about cigarettes. To help you out, here are some helpful links to get you acquainted with the literary traditions of our neighbor to the north (for some/most of us).

From Qwiklit - contains a few more recent titles near the end.


More of an author list from the National Post:
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The 50 Greatest, according to Ballast magazine (half fiction, half NF, includes a few more recently published titles):

August Theme: Diaries or Letters

Hi Classic Readers,

Before we storm into September, allow me to apologize to Anne Frank and Mary Shelley for not giving them a proper introduction in August, which was our Diary/Letters month. Those fans of the epistolary classics should not feel deterred from trying one out even though the official month has passed. Examples include a diverse range of titles, from Bram Stoker's Dracula to Stephen King's Carrie. The format was especially popular in the 18th century, with Samuel Richardson and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe being especially exemplary of the format.
-David (on behalf of the moderators)

I also recommend:
The Berlin Diaries by Marie Vassiltchikov

The Lisle Letters for any fans of Tudor England (6 vol version or 1 vol abridged version).

The letters of Abelard & Heloise:

The book of Margery Kempe:

September Theme: Banned or Challenged Books

Banned Books Week is the last week in September (and actually leaks a bit into October), so we are hitching our wagon to ALA's annual tradition and doing "Banned Books Month" in our monthly themes. ALA has an excellent resource for all things Banned (or Challenged) Books at and here are some highlights.

First off, each year ALA creates a "Top 10" list of the most challenged books of the last completed year (i.e. 2014 this year). Usually there are the "perennial" representatives: And Tango Makes Three, It's Perfectly Normal, and so on. The list naturally skews towards children's and YA books. However, visiting the list for this year was The Bluest Eye (Toni Morrison, 1970), so classics routinely make the list as well.

Also of interest, particularly to our group, is the "Banned or Challenged Classics" page, based on the Radcliffe Publishing Course 100:

I encourage you to explore the whole site if you have the opportunity!
-David (and the Moderators)

Monthly Themes Finished
I enjoyed working on this challenge.

JAN: Read that classic you always wanted to read, but never got around too.
Gulliver's Travels
Pride and Prejudice, for years I have thought about reading these.
FEB: Black Authors (for Black History Month)
Chinua Achebe-Things Fall Apart
MAR: Women Authors (for Women’s History Month)
Edith Wharton-The Age of Innocence, she is simply one of my favorites
Jamaica Inn-Daphne du Maurier
APR: Books Made Into Movies
2001: A Space Odyssey
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation
MAY: Books about a Journey
Around the World in Eighty Days
JUNE: Science Fiction/Fantasy
Children of the Mind
Dune
JULY: Canadian Authors
Robertson Davies-Fifth Business
AUG: Diary or Letters (Anne Frank, Frankenstein)
Flowers for Algernon
SEPT: Banned or Challenged Books (for Banned Books Week)
The Old Man and the Sea This was a surprising book for being challenged or banned.
Catch-22, On long hold at library started in Sep finished in Oct.
OCT: Terror, Horror, Suspense
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
The Lottery
The Tell-Tale Heart
NOV: Spanish / Hispanic Authors
Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez-Innocent Erendira and Other Stories
DEC: Short Stories
The Martian Chronicles
A Christmas Memory

Impressive. Great job crushing this year's challenges.

I'm impressed, Bob! I'm too ADD to follow the themes. Not to mention all the medical issues at our house this year. Maybe 2016 will be more themed for me.