Roommate Challenge

I got LibraryThing in 2008 and so started cataloguing my books as of then. I can tell, looking back, that I have 47 books which I’ve owned since prior to January 1st 2009. My roommate and I have developed a challenge in which I must read these books and try to do so before she can knit up all of her old yarn. (Initial launch post here.) Amanda and Iris are also joining in informally.

It’s interesting looking through because you can really see how much more non-fiction than fiction I read back in the day, and how strongly focused I still was on business and social entrepreneurship (I graduated with my Bachelor of Business Admin in May 2007). I also clearly was really interested in development and how that tied to business. Most of these books I’ve picked up at least once or twice before and then set aside for some reason.

Here are a list of the books I will have to read or officially abandon and give away, which I will update with review links and current status:

• Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen
• The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill
• Solutions for the World’s Biggest Problems: Costs and Benefits by Bjorn Lomborg
• The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs
• Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole by Benjamin R Barber
• How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas by David Bornstein
• Common Wealth by Jeffrey Sachs
• Broken Bodies, Broken Dreams: Violence Against Women Exposed by the United Nations
• The Road to Martyrs’ Square by Anne Marie Oliver DNF (03/01/12)
• The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid by CK Prahalad
• The Collapse of Globalism by John Saul
• The Art of War by Sun Tzu
• The Ethical Imagination by Margaret Somerville
• Holy War: The Crusades and their Impact on Today’s World by Karen Armstrong
• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
• Brief History of the Middle East by Christopher Catherwood
• The Story of My Experiments with Truth by Mahatma Gandhi
• The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
• The Odessey by Homer
• The Illiad by Homer
• The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
• State of the Worlds Refugees by the United Nations
• Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are by Rob Walker (12/03/12)
• Paradise Lost by John Milton
• Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose (26/01/12)
• Ending Violence Against Women: A Challenge for Development and Humanitarian Work by Francine Pickup
• Beyond Access: Transforming Policy and Practice for Gender Equality in Education by Sheila Aikman
• Reproductive Policy and Women’s Rights: Transforming Reproductive Choice by Ruth Dixon-Mueller
• The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein
• The Challenge of Third World Development by Howard Handelman
• Evaluation in the Human Services by Yvonne A Unrau
• More Lost Massey Lectures by Bernie Lucht
• Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R Covey
• Worldchanging by Alex Steffen
• The Human Rights Reader: Major Political Essays, Speeches and Documents from the Bible to the Present by Micheline Ishay
• The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
• Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
• The Geography of Hope by Chris Turner
• Appointment in Samara by John O’Hara
• Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf
• Hot Air: Meeting Canada’s Climate Change Challenge by Jeffrey Simpson (04/01/12)
• Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by John H Mearsheimer
• There is No Me Without You by Melissa Fay Greene
• Nations and Nationalism by Ernest Gellner
• Universities at Risk: How Politics, Special Interests and Corporatization Threaten Academic Integrity by James Turk
• Dreams from my Father by Barack Obama