Happy 2020, readers! I’m so happy you are still with us on this journey and I want you to know that AEC has a bunch of great things in store for 2020! Starting out in 2020, Lauren and I decided to do the 2020 Reading Women Challenge. Lauren is the queen of book challenges and I am continually awed by her reading list. That being said, this is my first book challenge, assuming that we do not count the summer library book challenges in elementary school. We probably shouldn’t count those, so I’m excited to be doing my first book challenge! Here are my starting three books!

Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II by Liza Munday

The first category I decided to tackle is “A Non-fiction title by a woman historian.” I figured this would be a great start for me, since I love history and my mother was a historian, so the interest is clearly genetic! That being said, I tend to read more ancient history and so this will be my first World War II book in… well, let’s just say more than 15 years. I’m looking forward to learning about the code breakers and will report back in a future blog.

Excellent Daughters: The Secret Lives of Young Women Who Are Transforming the Arab World by Katherine Zoepf

I’m a little bit cheating for this one, I confess. The category is “A Book about a Woman who Inspires You” and I got the idea to read this book from Hilary and Chelsea Clinton’s book Gutsy Women, which chronicles, in part, the fight of women to be able to drive in Saudi Arabia. Driving is one of my favorite things to do in the world and I still can recall so vividly the excitement I felt when I got my driver’s license. So I was drawn to the story of women working for the right to drive in their own country. I can’t wait to learn about more inspiring women from this book.

The Odyssey by Homer and translated by Emily Wilson

I’ll be honest, the Odyssey is my least favorite of the ancient Greco-Roman epics. But this translation of the Odyssey has been recommended to me a number of times, by both colleagues and friends, and so I am going to take the plunge and give it another shot. I hope that the voice of Emily Wilson will help me to see it in a new light and I look forward to reading a translation that is done by a woman. As a female classicist, I have often felt like my translation voice differed from some of my male counterparts, so this promises to be a great adventure in reading for me.