Honoring Dewey with a New Challenge: Support Your Local Authors

It was one year ago today that as I opened my Reader, I was greeted with the news that one our best book bloggin' buddies, Dewey, had passed away. The news traveled quickly through the book blogging community and it was an amazing thing to witness everyone coming together to think of ways to honor Dewey, and to keep her visions and projects alive.

As part of that, I've had a wonderful time helping out with Weekly Geeks from time to time, and by participating in Dewey's Books Challenge. I loved every one of those books I read for that one!

And now there's a mini challenge posted by Kailana of The Written World, suggesting that we do something new, or contribute in some way, to the book blogging community as a way to honor Dewey on this one year anniversary.

So, I've been pondering for awhile this challenge idea, and this seems like the perfect time to lay aside all my fears and worries and just throw it out there and see what happens.

My idea is to have a challenge called Support Your Local Authors. I'm always trying to stay up-to-date with what my local authors are writing and I think it would be fun to make it official and get others to join me. The idea is that where ever we live, we try to read the books that authors who live in our area are writing. I think it wold be fun to get to know each other better this way, and learn which authors live near everyone. Besides that, it's just cool to support your local authors!

I'd like to make this one of those ongoing challenges, with really no deadline, and just have it be a goal to read a certain amount of books during the year from your local author stash. You can try to catch up with past books, or simply try to keep up with the new books. You can help discover new authors and promote them, or help to maintain the "old" ones.

If you are interested, let me know in comments and if there's enough people then perhaps I'll go the next step and create a new blog as a place to keep track of everyone. I'm nervous that everyone is overly "challenged" these days, so it will be interesting to see what y'all think.