Sunday 21 November 2010

A post of possibilities

Having had a rather bad reading week I was wondering what to post this week. Yesterday I finished Hannah Tinti's The Good Thief, which was full of potential but never grabbed me in the slightest and forced myself to read The Castle of Otranto -afterall it is just 115 pages long (and a book I said I'd read for the November Novella Challenge) - I struggled through the stupidly long (3 pages) paragraphs and chance happenings in despair. Thankfully this morning things are looking up: I started and feasted on the first 100 pages of The Life and Death of Charlie St. Cloud and I saw all the new challenges posted over at A Novel Challenge.
Now my rule for next year was no more than three challenges at a time, and many of these look so tempting! I have already signed up for The Dysopian Challenge, and the 11 in 11 challenge over on Librarything, so I'm going to pick one and just keep a note here of all the ones which seem appealing and which I could manage within my tbr stacks. This way I have a place to refer back to when I've ticked a challenge off the list.

Challenges I'm interested in:
Quirky Brown Reading Challenge
South Asian Author Challenge
Victorian Challenge
YA Historical Fiction
Read a Myth
Nordic Challenge
Person of Colour Reading Challenge
Eastern European Reading ChallengeShared/Suggested/Read-a-long reads (I may participate or just use these as potential finds):
The 2011 Wolves Reading Event Who are reading from this schedule:
January (EL Fay): The Bread Givers, by Anzia Yezierska
February (Emily): Our Horses in Egypt by Rosalind Belben
March (Richard): Conversation in the Cathedral, by Mario Vargas Llosa
April (Sarah): The Dodecahedron, or Frames for a Frame, by Paul Glennon
May (Frances): What Ever Happened to Modernism?, by Gabriel Josipovici
June (Claire): The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz
July (EL Fay): Snow, by Orhan Pamuk
August (Frances): The End of the Story, by Lydia Davis
September (Richard): The Memoirs of Hadrian, by Marguerite Yourcenar
October (Sarah): House of Leaves, by Mark Danielewski
November (Emily): The Planetarium, by Nathalie Sarraute
December (Claire): Buying a Fishing Rod for my Grandfather, by Xingjian Gao

A year of Feminist Classics Reading Project who will be reading:
January: A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollestonecraft - Amy
February: The Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill - Ana
March: A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen - Emily
April: Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman - Iris
May: A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf - Ana
June: The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan OR The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer – Amy
July: The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir - Iris
August: The Women’s Room by Marilyn French - Emily
September: The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf - Amy
October: Ain’t I a Woman? by bell hooks - Iris
November: Gender Trouble by Judith Butler - Ana
December: Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde - Emily


The Challenge I'm starting the year with:
Back to the classics, I choose this one because as soon as I saw that you had to read one book for each of the following:
A Banned Book
A Book with a Wartime Setting (can be any war)
A Pulitzer Prize (Fiction) Winner or Runner Up: a list can be found here
A Children's/Young Adult Classic
19th Century Classic
20th Century Classic
A Book you think should be considered a 21st Century Classic
Re-Read a book from your High School/College Classes

My mind raced to think of the books I have on the tbr pile that could be used to complete this challenge.

I'm sure that these lists will grow and grow as they usually do in the lead up to the end of the year. I like the idea of joining in with one of the lower levels of participation 3-4 books and having a themed month of reading but also being able to weed those books out of the bookstacks that wouldn't have got a look in otherwise.

2 comments:

Sarah Reads Too Much said...

Thank you for joining in my Classics challenge! I am looking forward to knocking a few titles off my "Someday I'll read....." list!

Zee said...

I am so looking forward to the feminist classics and I do hope you will join us for the nordic challenge. If you read Ibsen for the feminist classics you have half of the lowest level nordic done ;) But I totally understand needing to limit challenges!