A challenge for grown-up readers

I am good at finding a variety of books for Little E to read, and for making time to go to the library to get books for her. Invariably though, our library trips don't involve us going home with anything other than picture books and DVDs from the "juvenile" shelf as E has to demonstrate how much she loves the library by running all over it and attempting to pull books from any shelves in her path

I am good at finding things for myself to read; the trouble is they almost all come from my bookshelf and I have read the vast majority of them an embarassing number of times before. So when I came across Judi J's post about two new reading challenges for 2012 I decided that I must try one. Like Judi, I'm going to attempt a combination of the Australian Women Writers 2012 Challenge and the Eclectic Reader Challenge 2012. So my challenge is:

• Read one book per month;
• From each of the 12 genres below;
• Each book must be written by an Australian female author; and
• After finishing each book, write a blog post about it.

The 12 genres ,along with my tentative booklist are:

1. Literary Fiction (something by Sonya Hartnett)
2. Crime/Mystery Fiction (The Golden Day by Ursula Dubosarky)
3. Romantic Fiction (either Paris Dreaming or Manhattan Dreaming by Anita Heiss)
4. Historical Fiction (Bitter Greens by Kate Forsyth. Cheating slightly, at least in the "eclectic" stakes, as I love Kate Forsyth's Witches of Eileanan series);
5. Young Adult
6. Fantasy (BattleAxe by Sara Douglass. I’ve seen her books in libraries many times without ever picking one up. I didn’t realise she was Australian).
7. Science Fiction (Dark Space, Marianne De Pierres, as the fourth book in the same series won the Aurealis Award)
8. Non Fiction (something by Germaine Greer)
9. Horror (no ideas here, so unless someone else inspires me I'll copy Judi and read Madigan Mine by Kirsten McDermott)
10. Thriller /Suspense (maybe something by Bronwyn Parry whose website describes her work as "Australian romantic suspense")
11. Classic (I'm not sure if it counts as "classic" but I've never read Sally Morgan's My Place so I'm going to try that)
12. Your favourite genre. (I'm adding poetry so as not to double up but haven't chosen an author yet).

Before working as a lawyer I used to quite like crime/mystery fiction but haven't read anything that would fit into that category since. For me it's the same as watching police shows on tv: it prompts thinking about work and invariably it prompts lots of complaints from both D and I as the shows are never accurate enough. Horror and thriller/suspense are also going to be a challenge.

This Wikipedia page is a useful source of authors if, as I was, you're struggling to think of enough. It's not arranged by any kind of genre so you just have to get clicking.