Get Ready For #NaNoReMo: National Novel Reading Month

You may have heard of NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, an annual event held each November in which writers the world over set themselves the challenge of writing an entire first draft novel in one month. Readers responded with NaNoReMo, or National Novel Reading Month. Because NaNoReMo doesn’t have any specific, single founder or single, specific website for participants, different folks have tried to get this thing off the ground in different months for years.

This year, John Wiswell is trying to do something about that. He’s declared February NaNoReMo, and has written a blog about it, in which he invites readers everywhere to join in and share their excitement about classic literature through social media. From his site:

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National Novel Reading Month begins February 1st. The rules are simple:

1. Find a classic novel you’ve never read, preferably one you’ve been meaning to read for a long time.

2. “Classic” is up to your definition. If you feel Beloved is a Modern Classic, you read it.

3. Between February 1st and 28th, read the book.

4. Join in on Twitter, blogs and Facebook to discuss your journey through the classic. You’re even welcome to come back [here to] discuss the books in comments threads on this post.

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Here’s the list of his readers’ chosen books so far, from the same post.

Click through on the links to view the Kindle editions of these books on Amazon; those marked with an asterisk are public-domain books that are available for free.

1. Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables*
2. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
3. Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow
4. George Eliot’s Middlemarch
5. T.H. White’s Once and Future King
6. John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath
7. Toni Morrison’s Beloved
8. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars*
9. Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby*
10. BOTH Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives and H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man*
11. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood
12. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
13. Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles (Audible audiobook edition, no Kindle edition currently available)
14. Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon
15. Bram Stroker’s Dracula*
16. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto*

You can participate in this global book club by blogging, commenting, Tweeting and Facebooking, using the hashtag #NaNoReMo. To see what books others are reading and what they’re saying about those books, search on “#NaNoReMo” on Google, Twitter, Facebook and anywhere else online. Do the search as ”  #NaNoReMo + “[your book title]”  ” (include the quotation marks around your chosen book’s title) to connect with others who are reading your chosen book.

What will your pick be?