Reading Challenge, September: "Family and Society"

It's September! We've read our way through eight months of 2019 so far, and now there are only a few months left to go (eek!). You should turn to a family worker, friend or colleague and say "my, this years is just flying past!"

Speaking of family members, friends and co-workers, the theme for the 2019 Reading Challenge in September is:

Family and Society.

There's a lot of scope to play with this (as usual). What is a family? Is it a group of people who are related to each other, or a group of people who relate to each other? And as for society? Well, almost any book can be a comment on society, if you read it that way.

Take, for example, the Harry Potter series, which is clearly a critique of the British boarding school culture and the way it creates unhealthy relationships that fester over decades. Or the Chronicles of Narnia, which show that family members ruin pretty much everything. The Lord of the Rings? Clearly all about overcoming social tensions in a multi-racial environment. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is obviously about overthrowing dictatorships and rehabilitating social outcasts and violent offenders. Alice in Wonderland? A scathing appraisal of both the attitudes of the upper classes and the legal system.

If you'd like to move away from fantasy for a while, you could justify reading every single Bond book as part of this theme (you didn't know we had all the Bond books, did you?), and probably a most of the Agatha Christie books, too (fancy reading The Body in the Library while actually in a library?). Little Women (which turned 150 this year) can probably be fit into this theme somehow - I'm sure you could find a way if you tried hard enough.

Remember, the aim of the challenge is to read as many books as you can that fit into this theme - but you get to justify exactly how the book fits into the theme. Along the way, you have to tick four boxes:

1. A fiction book
2. A non-fiction book
3. A book by an Australia author
4. A book by an author you haven't read before

And, of course, the one book may fill three of these categories, so you might only read two books to complete the challenge (but more books is, always, more fun).

And if anyone is after bonus challenge for this month, try this on for size:

Try to read at least one book in each of the following genres:

1. Romance
2. Western
3. Science Fiction
4. Crime

Happy reading!