I need to do this challenge too! I am at the point of needing (in the next few years) to do a major project in my condo, which will mean packing and storing a lot of my stuff. Due to some medical bills this spring I'm not in the position quite yet to get started, but I can at least start weeding out my belongings to make the eventual packing up easier...including my books. I am actually pretty picky about what comes into my place but I do acquire copies of books that aren't available in the various library systems I have access to, plus finds at charity book sales, little free libraries, etc and it's turned into quite an accumulation over the last ten years. I decided to just go down the bookshelf, and to commit to a chapter a night. If I want to read more, that's fine, but I'm making surprising progress a chapter at a time.
So far this spring, I've managed to knock out:
1. The Path Between the Seas by David McCullough, about the building of the Panama Canal. I really enjoyed the parts of this book that involved the work in Panama, especially how problems of civil engineering and public health were solved (and it was definitely interesting to read how sure the experts who were wrong were of their opinions...that was uncomfortably prescient for our own day). However, McCullough also spends a LOT of time discussing the political maneuvering in Paris and Washington D.C. that led to the building of the canal and I could have done with less of that. This book was published in 1976 and I think if it were written today there would be more discussion of the environmental and political impacts on the local population, but McCullough does spend time discussing the Black workers who were brought in from the Caribbean to do the heavy labor and how their experience was very different from the White French and American managers.
2. The Search for Shangri-La by Charles Allen, which is a mixture of travelogue and history of early Tibet. I suspect this one is a bit outdated in terms of its discussion of contemporary Tibet, since it was published in 2001 and there have been a lot of developments in that part of the world in the last 20 years. However, I did not know anything about the history of the region, and I really appreciated learning more about that part of the Silk Road.
3. Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks, which is a fictional retelling of the story of the first Native man to graduate from Harvard University in the 1660s. This one is a bit of a misdirect, because it's really the story of Bethia, the young woman who narrates the book, and who had a friendship with the young man. I can't speak to how accurate it is in terms of the way it discusses the Native people, but it's an excellent depiction of early Massachusetts. I thought the first half dragged a bit but zipped through the second half.
4. Call the Midwife by Jennifer Worth, the original inspiration for the PBS series. I watched the television show for a number of seasons although I've fallen away in the last couple years. It was definitely interesting to read the source material, and I plan to read the other two books in her trilogy about working for the midwifery service. The depictions of the nuns and fellow midwives are much less warm than the TV portrayals, and there's a hint of classism that the producers took out as well. Overall, though, I recognized a lot of stories from the book that were used in the series.
I live in a fairly big condo complex, so my favorite way to dispose of read books is to leave them in our mail room for my neighbors. Most of them disappear within 48 hours, but I do occasionally have to take a stack to Goodwill.
