aviance's 999 challenge - help please?

I'd like to join the challenge, have my categories worked out but no actual titles yet.

1. Books about food
2. Novels with 9 in the title
3. Books I would have read in high school
4. Australian books
5. Biographies – 20th century women
6. Books from the op shop or secondhand stall
7. Collections of short stories
8. Impulse reads
9. Award winners

Broad categories in most cases I know, and room for overlaps, but maybe 81 books in a year is too many, I've never counted how many books I read before. I need help with the 3rd category please - I now live in Australia, but didn't grow up here, so I'd like to read some of the books which were set books at the time I would have been in high school - does that make sense? I would have been in high school from 1968 to 1972, can any Australian LTers tell me what they had to read in high school around that time? Maybe some of them will be the same as I read in the UK, but no matter, I'll just read them again.
thanks for any suggestions,
aviance

I'm not sure if you are after books set by teachers or just reading out of school. Anyway I'm from New Zealand and suggest you try Ruth Park, a NZ/Australian writer - Playing Beatie Bow is one of her well-deserved award winning books. A classic Australian book I've enjoyed recently was The Getting of Wisdom published in 1910. A more modern Australian classic would have to be A fortunate Life by A B Facey. Picnic at Hanging Rock was published in 1970 and a film followed soon after.

Set texts in school - remember reading Vanity Fair, and A Passage to India

Ooh, Playing Beatie Bow was one of my favorite childhood books. Now where is my copy...

If your number 9 category isn't full yet, I would like to highly recommend Number 9 Dream by David Mitchell.

Aviance, at school in Melbourne in the sixties we read few Australian books. Mainly we read British books.

We read Slide Rule, which has an Australian connnection, and The Getting of Wisdom. Other Australian classics you might try are My Brilliant Career and Lantana Lane. I second aviatakh's recommendation of A Fortunate Life.

It isn't from the time period you mentioned, but I've just started reading Fat Man in History by Peter Carey, who is Australian and it is a collection of short stories so could overlap two categories.

How about Chocolat by Joanne Harris, Nine Coaches Waiting by Mary Stewart, All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey, Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood by Eileen Whitfield, Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger, and Possession by A.S. Byatt? Those would fit into categories 1,2,3,4,5,7 and 9, respectively, though I think Oscar and Lucinda may be more recent than what you're looking for.

I was at school in the 70s and we were still mostly reading British texts. The only Australian I remember reading was Patrick White and I would only recommend him if you are feeling brave. At university in the late 70s we studied Australian authors such as David Malouf and Peter Carey. I concur with all the previous recommendations of Australian books.

Number 9 Dream is an excellent book for your novels with 9 in the title challenge.

I like your categories. If I can't settle on a 9th category, I'm going to steal your "impulse reads." I like that! I need that!

The Potato Factory by Bryce Courtney (and the follow-up books) are Australian. I read this one and gave it a C -- interesting, worth the read, but not on one of my "best-of" lists.

Thanks so much for the suggestions everyone. I've read some of your suggestions, My Brilliant Career I thoroughly enjoyed, but I'd be happy to read it again. Have also read A Fortunate Life, because my daughter lived briefly in Wickepin where he spent some time. He truly did have a fortunate life, with all that he survived. Hadn't thought of Beattie Bow, although I know my daughters enjoyed it, so that can go on the list. I also know they read All Quiet on the Western Front at high school in the late nineties, I hadn't realised it had been on the reading list for so long. I'll work on filling my categories a bit more and post the final versions soon.
thanks again.

Well, I have filled two categories. I think I'm not going to rush to fill all of them just yet, that will allow for the addition of other books as the year goes on.

Category 2, Novels with Nine in the title
Number 9 Dream
Nine - and death makes ten
Nine below Zero
The Thirty Nine Steps
The Nine Bright Shiners
The Nineteenth wife
Ninety East Ridge
Nineteen Seventy Four
The Nine Tailors

I have to admit that I found most of these just by searching for 'Nine' in the title field of our State library website, and most of them seem to be thrillers or mysteries. I wonder if the same would hold true if one searched for other numbers, or is 9 a number particularly associated with that type of book?
I'm also not sure why the touchstone thing doesn't seem to like me, some of the books it is showing are not the ones I have typed - any ideas anybody?

Category 3, High School reads

Playing Beattie Bow
All Quiet on the Western Front
Slide Rule - I've read several of his novels and enjoyed them
The Getting of Wisdom
Lantana Lane
My Brilliant Career - have read it before, but enjoyed it, so looking forward to re-visiting it
Picnic at Hanging Rock - have a feeling I've read this too, but no matter
A Passage to India
Vanity Fair

Op Shop or thrift shop books

I have several of these already on my shelf unread, so the first few are:

Pandora by Jilly Cooper
Redheap by Norman Lindsay
Folly Field by Adrian Bell - I grew up in Norfolk in the UK, so when I saw this on the shelf in an op shop in Australia I had to buy it. The touchstone doesn't seem to have heard of it though.

Enough to give me a start.

Not sure how much this helps but, I'm Canadian and lived in Australia for a year when I was 19 (1982-83). Two books I picked up that were AussieLit that I still pack around are The Last Wave, by Petru Popescu and Monkey Grip, by Helen Garner. Somehow I heard while I was there that these were "must reads". Funny, but it was probably ten years before I ever considered reading one work of Canadian literature. It just wasn't a thing.

Re Touchstones.

When you enter a touchstone it loads at the right of your message. Check that it does load, and then that it is the right book. If it isn't, then click on 'others', and more possibilities will load. Click on the right one. If you can't get the right one to load you can either give up totally on the idea, or find the book on LT and create a link.

The way this searches is not obvious to many of us. It has the advantage that you can get away with typing the wrong title and still find the book you want, but the disadvanges are obvious. Usually more popular books end up on top even if they aren't the title you want.

If you later edit your message you have to recheck the touchstones.

BTW I loved Potato Factory etc.

There is an Austrailian author I discovered a couple years ago who has written some interesting young adult time travel/fantasy books, Marianne Curley. She wrote one trilogy, The Guardians of Time, and one stand alone called Old Magic. They were all very entertaining.

Thanks again for the suggestions, and for the explanation of how to make the touchstones work, although in some cases they still don't. Guess I have to add the books.
I've started the challenge, in my 7th category, with The Oxford Book of Modern Women's Stories. I don't usually read short stories, which is why I included the category, and so far it's mostly reminding me why I don't read short stories - I don't enjoy them much. However, it's introducing me to some authors I have never read before, so I mean to do some research about some of them and try to understand better, then perhaps I'll enjoy the stories more. I'm a little puzzled too by the 'modern' in the title, since they seem to date from throughout the 20th century pretty much, but I suppose 'modern' is a relative term, it can mean pretty much any period you want it to. So far I've enjoyed Edith Wharton's Afterward, and Virginia Woolf's The Legacy. Stevie Smith's Is there a Life Beyond the Gravy? has me completely baffled, I've never read anything of hers before, so she will be one author I'll read up on. Maybe one of my categories should have been 'Books I need to read about the books in my other categories"!

I have a food category in my 999 challenge as well, with quite a few books that I'm looking forward to reading. Feel free to check out my thread if you're still looking for books in that category!

http://www.librarything.com/topic/54905

sarahbird, I haven't been here on a long time, too busy reading, but I'll certainly look in your list for books about food, I haven't found any yet.
I have read some books in other categories

Category 4 Australian books

Swords and Crowns and Rings
The Last Mile Home
True History of the Kelly Gang

Category 7 - short stories
Along with The Oxford Book of Modern Women's Stories
I've also read a book of short stories by Darcy Niland
Murder Most Crafty

I'm not sure I'm going to make 91 books this year, not at this rate. There will have to be some overlaps!

People either love it or hate it, but I'd recommend Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky for your food category. For your "9" category, I'd suggest Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women by Geraldine Brooks, which I'm reading for 999 myself. :-)

I have a food category too. So far I've enjoyed both The Devil's Cup (on coffee) and The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken this year (reviews posted). I'll check back to see what you've selected to get some more ideas for myself.

Other past reads I found very worthwhile include The Omnivore's Dilemma and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (both pleas for local sourcing of food) and Coming Home to Eat (more eating locally but also focused on traditional foods of Native Americans). I would also recommend Stand Facing the Stove (about the writing of the Joy of Cooking) and My Life in France (Julia Child).

Thanks #19 and #20 for your suggestions, at this rate I'll fill the category easily. I did happen across a book at the library last week which also fits and is incredibly interesting - Hungry Planet. I've skimmed through looking at the pictures so far, and now settling down to read more thoroughly. It looks at a typical week's food for different families all around the world, what they eat, how much it costs, how they cook etc. Really puts some things in perspective, like the fact that I spend about as much feeding my 2 dogs and 2 horses as some families spend to feed themselves. I guess I could justify it by saying that I consider the animals as part of my family (I'm not really very loopy!), and there are well documented benefits to human mental and physical health which come from having companion animals. That's my story anyway, and I'm sticking to it.

I'm think I'm going to have to give up this thread for LENT. All this pointing to delicious treatises on food mean I'd have to cook and then eat them! LOL.

I second the recommendations for Nine Parts of Desire, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and The Omnivore's Dilemma. Great books! I would also recommend The Best of Roald Dahl for your collections of short stories, I am in the middle of it now and loving it.

Also, a few biographies of 20th century women that I enjoyed (and of various places and times) were Last Night I Dreamed of Peace (diary actually of a young women Vietnamese doctor), Desert Queen (Gertrude Bell), Iran Awakening (Shirin Ebadi), and Everybody was so Young (though about Gerald as well as Sara Murphy - but such an interesting read).

Hungry Planet sounds fascinating. I checked and they have a copy at my local library. Several years ago I saw a photo exhibition (at O'Hare airport I think) showing all the possessions of people around the world...pulled out and stacked in front of their homes. It was really absorbing. This book sounds even better!

24> If the year was 1994 or thereabout, the exhibition might've been associated with the book Material World: A Global Family Portrait, which had a "sequel" of sorts in Women in the Material World.

Well I guess it really was a thought-provoking exhibit if I still remember it 15 years later! The title "Material World" even rings a bell.

For your "9" category, I think you've already got The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers. If you like mysteries, there is also John Dickson Carr's The Nine Wrong Answers.

Also, Heinrich Boll's Billiards at Half Past Nine.

I've also read a baseball book called Nine Innings: The Anatomy of Baseball As Seen Through the Playing of a Single Game, written by Daniel Okrent.

If you like political-type books, I would highly recommend Jeffrey Toobin's book, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court. That book was fascinating.

Again, thanks for all the suggestions. No wonder everybody on here has a huge pile of TBRs!!
I haven't counted up how many books I've read yet this year to see whether I am on target or not - I suspect not. I also need to start putting some requests in to our local library to get in the books I want to read. Sometime I find ones which will fit just browsing, but others I will need to ask for. One downside to living in Australia (and there are not many) is that books are expensive to buy, so I buy very few new books. We do have generally good libraries though, with a good inter-library loan system, and last week I happened upon an excellent secondhand book shop which I hadn't been to before. For anybody in Perth, it's on Albany Highway just south of Carousel (Cannington) and on the other side of the road, but for the moment it's name escapes me. Ask me again in a day or two!
Happy reading