If you’re anything like me, January means it’s time to go bonkers setting your goal for the Goodreads Reading Challenge. Your method might entail looking at your number from last year (not great, but hey, you were busy) and then you might subtract ten percent so you’re not disappointed in yourself … then you add it back. After all, the point of a new year is to try and do better than you did last year, right?
This year, I’m adding up all the time I spend commuting to and from work (two hours daily) and going to the gym (three hours weekly, when I’m good). That equals one 13-hour audiobook each week — or nearly 2/3 of The Nix, which Audible’s Editors chose as the Best Listen of 2016. At that rate, I’d knock out about 35 books in 2017, not to mention the 25 more books on paper I’ll likely read.
Hold the phone: Does this mean I can claim 60 books as a reasonable goal this year? Eek! Then again, it is a “challenge.” Why not shoot the moon? Listening will definitely help you get there, and this list of Goodreads Choice Award winners is a solid place to start.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2017
National Book Award Winner 2016
Amazon.Com Number One Book of the Year 2016
Number One New York Times Best Seller
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. All the slaves lead a hellish existence, but Cora has it worse than most; she is an outcast even among her fellow Africans, and she is approaching womanhood, where it is clear even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a slave recently arrived from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they take the perilous decision to escape to the North.
In Whitehead's razor-sharp imagining of the antebellum South, the Underground Railroad has assumed a physical form: a dilapidated boxcar pulled along subterranean tracks by a steam locomotive, picking up fugitives wherever it can. Cora and Caesar's first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But its placid surface masks an infernal scheme designed for its unknowing black inhabitants. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher sent to find Cora, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom. At each stop on her journey, Cora encounters a different world.
As Whitehead brilliantly recreates the unique terrors for black people in the pre-Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America, from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once the story of one woman's ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shatteringly powerful meditation on history.
2016, National Book Awards, Winner
2017, Books Are My Bag Readers Awards novel category, Winner
2017, Arthur C. Clarke Award, Short-listed
2017, Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award, Long-listed
2018, International Dublin Literary Award, Nominated
2017, Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, Short-listed
2017, The Man Booker Prize, Long-listed
2017, Pulitzer Price for Fiction, Winner
Goodreads Choice Awards Winner for Memoir & Autobiography 2016
Winner: Memoir/Biography
"Thanks to When Breath Becomes Air, those of us who never met Paul Kalanithi will both mourn his death and benefit from his life. This is one of a handful of books I consider to be a universal donor — I would recommend it to anyone, everyone." –Ann Patchett See all finalists in Memoir/Biography
