If you haven’t signed up for the #RogersReads reading challenge for 2020, now is the time! Click the #RogersReads image on the library website or use this link to begin logging your completed challenges and enter for monthly prizes! Each month, prizes will be awarded to two readers who enter a new book into their online log by the end of the month. If you complete all twelve prompts before February 2021, you will be entered for the grand prize that will be awarded at the end of the challenge.
Each month we will be highlighting one of the twelve reading prompts along with some ideas of titles that could fulfill that prompt. Share your own ideas and show off your progress by tagging us on social media with #RogersReads. Please remember that you can complete the #RogersReads prompts in any order using eBooks, audiobooks, or print copies of a title. We are excited to see what you select to fulfill this prompt!
Read a Book First Published in the Year You Were Born.
We can’t create a recommendation for each and every reader’s birthday, but we can take some guesses about what may fit your needs. You may have to do some additional research to find the perfect book from your birth year, but we have collected some options to get you started. We have listed below several titles from each decade, but you can always contact the library if you need help finding the perfect book for you!
1930
- How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie (1936)
- Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie (1934)
- Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
- The Waves by Virginia Woolf (1931)
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)
- Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (1936)
- The Good Earth by Pearl S Buck (1931)
1940
- Adam of the Road by Elizabeth Janet Gray (1942)
- Native Son by Richard Wright (1940)
- The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (1940)
- A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith (1943)
- The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1943)
- The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (1947)
- Under the Volcano by Malcom Lowry (1947)
1950
- The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien (1954)
- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958)
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952)
- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951)
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1953)
- Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote (1958)
- Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin (1953)
1960
- A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul (1961)
- The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley (1965)
- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (1969)
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
- Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein (1961)
- Cover Her Face by P.D. James (1962)
1970
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (1970)
- The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (1970)
- Roots by Alex Haley (1976)
- Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown (1970)
- Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume (1970)
- Grendel by John Gardner (1971)
- Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi (1974)
1980
- The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1982)
- Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984)
- The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros (1984)
- A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (1988)
- White Noise by Don DeLillo (1985)
- Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty (1985)
- Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)
1990
- How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents by Julia Alvarez (1991)
- Jazz by Toni Morrison (1992)
- Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler (1993)
- The Voyage of the Narwhal by Andrea Barrett (1998)
- The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (1998)
- The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead (1999)
- Holes by Louis Sachar (1998)
2000
- White Teeth by Zadie Smith (2000)
- Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer (2000)
- Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)
- The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (2001)
- Runaway by Alice Munro (2004)
- Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (2004)
We are looking forward to a year full of challenging new reads with you!
Happy reading!
The rest of this year’s challenges are listed below with links, when possible, to suggestions that can fulfill them.
Read a book with “Bronze,” “Silver,” or “Gold” in the title.
Read a book set in the “Jazz Age” (1920s).
Read a book first published in the year you were born.
Read a book that includes a map.
Read a book with a title that is only one word.
Read a book that is the first in a series.
Read a book, fiction or non-fiction, about a historical figure.
Read a book someone you know dislikes.
Read a book from the Young Adult section.
Read a book that is not written in traditional prose.
Read a book that has a season in the title.
Read a book about what you wanted to “grow up to be” when you were a kid.