Wrapping up a Challenge, on to the next!

J.C.'s Banned Books Challenge is wrapping up since September ended (but Banned Books Week continues through Saturday) and I didn't finish all my books that I said I would finish this month. *hangs head* I did get through American Psycho and Frankenstein (already on the books for BNBC September) and I did manage to get to page 100 in The Satanic Verses...but I didn't have much time to read Foucault's Pendulum or make it much farther than page 50 in The Naked and the Dead. Must try harder.

On a side-note for Banned Books Week I did some Googling and figured out why A Light in the Attic was one of the most challenged books of the 1990s...it apparently inspires disobedience in children through breaking of dishes and dying because your parents won't buy you a pony. Also, it has occult underpinnings because there are ghoulies and ghosties and witches. Yup, pretty sure I never got out of doing the dishes by breaking them on purpose and I didn't start worshipping Satan because my favorite book of poetry had some imaginary beings.

I remember laughing when reading Silverstein's books. A lot. My parents did, too. Parents seem to be a big theme in BBW posts this week, how parents try to control what other parents' children read. If someone feels something is not correct for their children then it must be bad for all children. You know, some things are bad for everybody. Doing lines of cocaine and walking down the middle of the freeway is bad for everyone involved; reading Brave New World or Catcher in the Rye or even American Psycho is not bad for everyone. But that's a personal choice (dude, even the coked-up lane-divider thing is a personal choice, albeit a bad one). Don't take away another's personal choice; the First Amendment guarantees our freedom to choose, but that also means we have to respect others' choices.

Moving on. Swapna's Clear Off Your Shelves Challenge starts today. Woot! To that end I will start my challenge reading by finishing the books I said I would read for the Banned Books Challenge. All are less than half done (in two cases barely 10% read) and I've purchased all of them in the past and the books were languishing on the shelves until September. Ha.

I'm wondering how to keep track/count of the books for this challenge on the blog. Particularly since the books for the challenge have to be a percentage of the total number of books I read these two months. My coding/layout skillz are not particularly good but I'm thinking maybe a post that I update and can be placed in my sidebar like a widget? Is that even possible on Blogger? Help? If you have Blogger tech tips suggestions please comment and let me know! Many thanks in advance.

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